Polttomerkitty

This strange hybrid of a B-Movie is a cross between a film noir and a 'women's picture', with a screenplay in part written by Samuel Fuller yet directed by Douglas Sirk, two directors whose work you might think couldn't be more different. It's a film that never quite goes the way you expect it to as former prisoner Patricia Knight, (a kind of poor man's Gene Tierney), is released into the custody of parole officer Cornel Wilde who soon finds himself falling for her, despite the fact that her former lover and bad guy John Baragrey is waiting to claim her.

There's hardly a believable moment in the entire picture which still manages to cram an awful lot of plot into its reasonably short running time and it's certainly stylish as befits an early film from the man who went on to make "All That Heaven Allows" and "Written on the Wind". It's harder perhaps to get a handle on Fuller's contribution, except maybe in the total lack of sentimentality in the central relationship while the audacity of the ending is undeniably novel; it's as if they filmed several endings and settled on the one on view.