Noir and away: Somewhere in the annals of America's coolest and most beloved mega-genre arises this 1946 sweatbox, in which amnesiac WWII vet John Hodiak returns to Los Angeles and scours the soul-corrupt cityscape for clues to his identity—a hunt that inevitably leads to bodies, stolen money, and the nauseous possibility that he's better off not knowing and leaving civilization for good. If Kafka had been born in mid Wilshire, he could've written it. Co-penned, in fact, by Lee Strasberg, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's nervous nightmare (made in his first year of directing) isn't an all-hallowed member of the noir canon—it's fairly slick, and Mankiewicz has little or no existentialist cred. But it sings the school's black-hearted lament, and the frankness of its overwhelming anxiety—in the burgeoning postwar period, when cheeks were supposed to be pink and life was good again—can still be shocking. Hodiak, remembered today as the tough guy dubiously wooing the dyke out of... More >>>