John Payne stars in Phil Karlson’s two-fisted thriller as a down-on-his-luck boxer reduced to a night shift cab hack, the easy target of his disappointed wife’s enduring scorn. His wife’s sudden murder, in a dark fulfillment of his unspoken wish, only brings bigger problems as he must move quickly to clear his name while staying one step ahead of the law and the criminal underworld. Karlson’s direction is extremely lean and sophisticated, as he plays with a Chinese box structure of hidden perspectives and brilliantly stages one of the most unexpected and cruelest jokes in film noir. Little known today, John Payne was, like Dick Powell, an extremely popular song and dance man who grew tired of the sunny side of the street and rejected lucrative assignments to seek out tougher roles after the war.

Years before The Godfather, 1950s noir great Phil Karlson offered one of postwar Hollywood’s most powerful studies of syndicated crime as an extension and dark allegory for the American family. Richard Conte plays an ex-accountant for the mob who is lured back into the web of the criminal underworld by the mysterious disappearance of his younger brother. A loose adaptation of Georges Simenon’s eponymous novel, The Brothers Rico uses minimal means to evoke the cruel and omnipresent menace of organized crime and the spiraling paranoia of a man on the run.