7 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
The police painstakingly track down a brilliant, elusive thief and cop killer who seems to have the ability to vanish into thin air.
Starring: Richard Basehart, Scott Brady, Roy Roberts, Whit Bissell, James CardwellFilm-Noir | 100% |
Crime | 9% |
Thriller | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.37:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 2.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Quick — name a late forties film noir with a climactic showdown in an urban sewer system, shot with skewed perspectives swathed in chiaroscuro lighting. Of course the obvious answer is Carol Reed’s iconic The Third Man, but interestingly just a little less than a year before The Third Man was released, an American production offered a very similar sequence, albeit this time in the storm sewers of Los Angeles rather than the underground labyrinth of postwar Vienna. That probably coincidental connection has long given He Walked by Night a certain allure for film trivia buffs, but there’s another nugget of pop culture the film offers as well, courtesy of a supporting turn by one Jack Webb, whose role as one of the forensic experts on the police force who is attempting to chase down a cop killer and serial burglar evidently soon led to his now legendary work on Dragnet. There’s actually a kind of “just the facts, ma’am” ambience at hand in He Walked by Night which may have in and of itself suggested the way forward for Webb when he was thinking about how to detail the investigatory lives of everyday cops, and in fact there's a text card at the head of the film averring that while this is a fact based story, "the names have been changed to protect the innocent".
He Walked by Night is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of ClassicFlix with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.37:1. I frankly wavered a bit on how to best score this presentation, since it's more variable than ClassicFlix's pretty stellar looking release of T-Men. ClassicFlix's David Kawas shared that MGM provided the source for this, which Kawas stated "was not in the best shape", and that the label did significant further work on it. This has an overall softer appearance than T- Men, something that only increases in isolated moments, resulting in a certain variability in clarity and sharpness, as can be seen by sampling some of the screenshots accompanying the review. Like T-Men, there are a lot of opticals in this film (many dissolves, for example), and while those of course add to some of the variances, others accrue when there aren't any opticals at all, something that I assume points back to problematic source elements. A lot of this transfer looks very good indeed, if never quite at T-Men levels of excellence, but more persnickety videophiles should be prepared for occasional dips in sharpness. There are a few very minor blemishes that pop up, but nothing I'd term overly distracting. Contrast is generally very strong (if again at times slightly variable), helping to delineate some of those shadowy, mist strewn Los Angeles streets (and sewers) that Alton shot so evocatively. Grain generally looks natural and resolves organically. I'm scoring this a 4.0, perhaps partly on "effort", though I could see others feeling a 3.5 is more reflective of some of the variances on display.
He Walked by Night features a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono track that is probably unavoidably narrow sounding, but which actually has a decent amount of "oomph" in terms of sound effects like gunshots or even violent kicks (Roy is not a nice guy and he doesn't suffer fools, or foolish accomplices, gladly). While Leonid Raab's score sounds okay if a bit brash, one of the interesting things about He Walked by Night is how certain key scenes play without music, or indeed without many effects at all, giving the film an almost "silent movie" ambience at times. Dialogue comes through the gauntlet of time perfectly well, with no problems to report.
ClassicFlix has really provided noir fans with a fantastic one-two punch with their releases of T-Men and now He Walked by Night. I know some fans of both films actually prefer T-Men, but for me, this "contest" has a clear winner, and it's this film. He Walked by Night is surprisingly exciting, given its kind of "by the numbers" procedural angle, and Basehart is absolutely riveting as a pretty nasty bad guy. Video here has occasional hurdles, and audio is probably unavoidably constrained by its age, but ClassicFlix has done an admirable job of spiffing up this film, which evidently fell into the public domain. Highly recommended.
1942
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1948
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Indicator Series | Limited Edition
1949
Warner Archive Collection
1953
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1948