He Walked by Night (Bryan Foy Productions, Eagle-Lion, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (March 2) I once again cracked open the 50-film= “Crime Wave” DVD box and brought forth a quite interesting movie for my husband Cahrles and I to watch together: He Walked by Night, a 1948 low-budget film noir from Eagle-Lion Pictures (the former Producers’ REleasing Corporation, or PRC, purchased by J. Arthur Rank because he wanted his own U.S. outlet for his british films – he even picked a name for the merged company that would associate the national animals of the U.S. and U.K.!).Among other things, He Walked by Night gave birth to the radio and then TV series Dragnet; the film’s technical advisor,real-life Los Angeles police sergeant Marty Wynn,who suggested to actor Jack Webb (who had a minor part in the film and,surprisingly, did not play a cop) that he launch a radio series in which he would play a police sergeant investigating crimes drawn from real life. Though the narration in He Walked by Night is delivered in third person instead of by the lead police official investigating the crime, a lot of the other key elements of Dragnet are already here, including the stentorian narrator, the specificity with which the locales are named as the real locations, and even the line at the end of the fi;m’s written foreword, ”Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” Even the word “dragnet” features prominently in the film's dialogue, relating to a police sweep of the area in which a mysterious criminal has just shot a police officer, Rawlins (John McGuire). The cops round up just about everybody in the neighborhood where the shooting took place in a scene that ias more than a bit of “Round up the usual suspects” about it, and they’re taken to the police station and basically forced to prove their innocence.

He Walked by Night is an odd mix of police procedural and film noir, dealing with a master criminal named Roy Martin, a.k.a. Roy Morgan (Richard Basehart), loosely based on real-life criminal Erwin ‘Machine Gun” Walker and a series of crimes he committed in 1946. Like the real-life Walker, Roy Martin had once worked for the police department – though while Walker was a clerk in the fingerprints department of the fingerprint division, Martin in the movie worked as a radio technician until he was drafted during World War II. He had a private job with the Reves Sound Service (which really existed, though not the way it’s depicted in this film). Roy declined his old job when boss Paul Reeves (Whit Bissell), offered it back to him after the war. though Roy periodically showed up at Reeves’ office with elaborate pieces of radio and TV equipment. Supposedly these were items he invented and offered to Reeves either to sell them or rent them out, but in fact the one piece of equipment we see, a TV projector (back when projection TV’s were still a novelty; in fact, TV’s themselves were still a novelty in 1948), turns out to have been stolen from a man named Dunning (Thomas Browne Henry), who shows up at Reeves offering to buy it and then realizes it’s actually his. Rawlins is shot but doesn’t die right away – he lingers in a coma for a day or so and there’s a marvelous bit of acting by Louise Kane as his widow, silently reacting to the hews that he’s died – and later another officer s shot by Martin and so severely wounded that he’s going to be paralyzed for the rest of his life.

Though it certainly visually qualifies as film noir, especially given John Alton’s extraordinary cinematography (Alton got a title card to himself in the opening credits, a rare honor for a cinematographer then, and in the film’s recent reissue the trailer was reworked to make Alton’s presence a selling point),thematically it doesn’t. The good cops are all good, the bad villain is all bad, and there aren’t the usual sexual motives behind him. In fact, Roy Martin is what would nowadays be called an ‘incel” (short for “involuntarily celibate”), though writers John C. Higgins and Crane Wilbur don’t suggest that his sheer lack of any sexual or romantic attachments make him a criminal. In fact, one of the weakest elements of this film is that we neverget an explanation of What Made Roy Run – that bothered Charles even more than it did me – despite the hint dropped by the narrator (Reed Hadley) early on that certainly a man who commits such elaborately planned crimes must have some sort of overarching motive. The best parts of the film are the opening and the closing, both extended sequences with little or no dialogue and Alton’s images taking the noir look to the max. The climax takes place in the Los Angeles storm drains, a series of underground tunnels and pipes deigned to carry rainwater to toe sea, which Martin has used effectively to evade capture through most of the film. Once the cops finally figure out that that’s how he’s getting away from them so quickly and easily, they corner him in the drains and ultimately gun him down and kill him – unlike the real Walker, who was taken alive, convicted, sentenced to death but declared legally isane just before he was to be executed. Instead he was held in a mental institution for 12 years before he was declared sane, his sentence was commuted to life without parole, and twice he appealed to the California Supreme Court. On its second hearing the state supreme court threw out the “without parole” part of his sentence, and he was duly paroled in 1974. Walker changed his name and lived an apparently above-board life as a chemist until his death in 2008.

He Walked by Night had both writer and director trouble; Harry Essex was called in for some uncreedited tweaking of the script The director of record was Alfred Werker, a better-than-average 20th Century-Fox house director who made his best film, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), there. It was the second of the 14 films featuring Basil Rathbone asSherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, and to my mind quite the best of them. Werker also did A-Haunting We Will Go, an attempt at horror-comedy with Laurel and Hardy, the second of their generally sorry set of six Fox films. All the source3s I have on this film, including its imdb.com page and the book The Film Noir Encyclopedia, state that Anthony Mann took over as director on part of the film, but my sources are frustratingly unclear as to just what Mann directed in the film, why he was called in or how much work he did. Both Werker and Mann were talented directors but without much of a personal stamp – it’s not like Nicholas Ray taking over for Josef von Sternberg on the 1952 film noir Macao, in which the junctures were quite obvious, especially in their attitudes towards Jane Russell’s character (Sternberg tried to make her remote and Dietrichesque, while in Ray’s footage she’s basically one of the boys – and it’s not clear why a second director was needed, though Mann would make his reputation a year later with T-Men, another part-procedural and part-noir but a better movie than He Walked by Night.