Good early film from director Jean Negulesco, made well before he went all "Three Coins In A Fountain" on us with gloppy, sloppy Technicolor sentimentality. This noir, by contrast, is, of course, in glorious black and white, set in Los Angeles, not Rome, and featuring, in place of true love triumphing at the end, a properly ambiguous denouement wherein the two lovers, standing on a damp, foggy pier in what looks to be Huntngton Beach, muse on such unromantic subjects as, per the film's title, mortality, as well as fate, and while they are talking an old man is dying of gunshot wounds behind them in the bait and tackle shop. Take that, Technicolor!
Also contributing to the film's overall quality is a fine screenplay by W. R. Burnett with sharp, intelligent dialogue that gives us insight into the personalities of several different kinds of con artists as well as a vulnerable widow. And playing these characters is a fine assortment of 40s actors led by John Garfield as the remorseful gigolo and who is ably supported by Geraldine Fitzgerald, an actor I always felt was most under rated, as the widow, Walter Brennan at his best as a seedy, carny type of crook, George Colouris ,of "Citizen Kane" fame, as an aging, resentful gigolo, and Faye Emerson (kind of a poor man's Liz Scott) as the generic bad girl.
So why not a 9 or a 10? Well, the use of backlots instead of location shooting, relatively easy to do when you're filming in LA, struck me as kinda cheesy and the last third of the film sort of gets lost in the plot twists with un necessary stuff set in a diner and a fairly lackluster final shootout on the above mentioned pier that shows that Negulesco was better with mood than he was with action. Give it a B.
Also contributing to the film's overall quality is a fine screenplay by W. R. Burnett with sharp, intelligent dialogue that gives us insight into the personalities of several different kinds of con artists as well as a vulnerable widow. And playing these characters is a fine assortment of 40s actors led by John Garfield as the remorseful gigolo and who is ably supported by Geraldine Fitzgerald, an actor I always felt was most under rated, as the widow, Walter Brennan at his best as a seedy, carny type of crook, George Colouris ,of "Citizen Kane" fame, as an aging, resentful gigolo, and Faye Emerson (kind of a poor man's Liz Scott) as the generic bad girl.
So why not a 9 or a 10? Well, the use of backlots instead of location shooting, relatively easy to do when you're filming in LA, struck me as kinda cheesy and the last third of the film sort of gets lost in the plot twists with un necessary stuff set in a diner and a fairly lackluster final shootout on the above mentioned pier that shows that Negulesco was better with mood than he was with action. Give it a B.