Sunday | August 4, 2013 5:00 pm

I Walk Alone

Screening on Film

Directed by Byron Haskin.
With Burt Lancaster, Lizabeth Scott, Kirk Douglas.
US, 1948, 16mm, black & white, 98 min.
Print source: Academy Film Archive

A lesser known dark gem from Lancaster's noir period, I Walk Alone is a melancholy study of betrayal and male loneliness. Byron Haskin's debut feature offers Lancaster’s ex-con returning wide-eyed from an unjust prison term. An emblem of the old world petty gangster, he has been left behind by the new corporate criminal – embodied by his cunning ex-partner played with feline unctuousness by Kirk Douglas. The film's moody allegory of a changing world order points more to 1930s French poetic realism than the hard-bitten postwar American crime drama, a quality captured in the flickering moth-in-flame intensity of Lizbeth Scott's whispered lisp and the somnambulist sadness of Wendell Corey as Lancaster's ill-fated ally.