Lt. Calhoun is married to his job, a union of flesh, bone, concrete and steel, so when a blind girl is kidnapped and his demesne becomes a crime scene, he’ll protect it at all costs. Rudolph Mate’s procedural noir races along like a train through Chicago’s Union Station, never stopping for exposition or background, thundering towards its brutal climax in a taught 80 minutes. DP Daniel Fapp, who would eventually be nominated for multiple Academy Awards (including an Oscar for Robert Wise’s WEST SIDE STORY), utilizes busy location set-pieces and long, deep focus tracking shots, while composing the characters is skulking shadows, his medium-long shots allowing the actors to use their body language to convey restless tension. The film also refrains from smothering the tension in a strident score, instead allowing silence and diegetic sound to create a volatile reality.
The plot is rather straightforward without interruption: a blind girl is kidnapped, and a gaggle of gangsters attempt to extort her wealthy father for $100,000. The story doesn’t dwell on either the past or future, it deals with the crime moment by moment, hanging on every phone call or messenger boy. When Joyce (Nancy Olson) sees a car racing along beside her train and two men board and act like strangers, she becomes suspicious. She glimpses a revolver in a shoulder holster and soon the police at the titular next stop are notified in advance. Turns out, the men have kidnapped Lorna (Allene Roberts), the handicapped daughter of her employer. Though the plot is uncovered, the police must allow Mr. Murchison (Herbert Heyes) to follow the kidnapper’s instructions so they don’t tip them off, as the girl’s life is at stake. As every inch of the station is under surveillance, Lt. William Calhoun (William Holden) and his mentor and staff must find the girl before the worst happens.
The film reflects some interesting moral ambiguities as the police capture one of the gangsters and threaten to throw him from the platform, “make it look like an accident”, during an interrogation! In another scene, when Lorna is discovered by a police officer in the back of a car, the gang leader fucking guns down the cop and his own girlfriend as they wrestle on the ground. How’s that for loyalty! Lorna even gets punched in the face, proving that criminals treat everyone equally, handicaps be damned. She’s secreted away in underground tunnels full of thrumming high tension lines, and the story should have given us a shocking ending as opposed to the gunpowder kind.
The film ends with a union of another kind, alluding to possible emotional merging between Lt. Calhoun and Joyce. But please, only call him Willy in private.
Final Grade: (B)
