Director Neill, best-known for his string of Sherlock Holmes movies, made this interesting film noir just before his untimely death. He gets off to a good start with a clever opening shot involving Dan Duryea's profile, a Wilshire Boulevard sign, and a long zoom into an apartment window.
We immediately meet the corpse-to-be, Mavis Marlowe, a tough broad who can't even be nice to her long-suffering maid. Her estranged husband Martin Blair (Duryea) is in the lobby trying to see her, but the doorman fends him off. And who's that scuttling into the elevator? Looks like Peter Lorre, and of course that means trouble.
Poor Kirk Bennett, one of Marlowe's blackmail victims, shows up at the wrong moment and discovers Mavis's dead body. The cop (Crawford), eager to tie up the case, is happy when Bennett is quickly convicted and sent to death row. But he's innocent, or so claims his wife (June Vincent).
In a credulity-stretching plot device, she enlists the help of Blair to find the real killer, who must of course be the sinister Lorre (a nightclub owner named Marko). You'd think she'd be in a hurry, considering her husband is on the fast track to the gas chamber, but she & Blair decide the best way to catch Marko is by putting together an act and getting hired by his night club. The tension begins to mount, until what seems like the denouement becomes the beginning of an unexpected final chapter with a nice twist.
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