My favorite Peter Lorre movie, and that’s saying a lot. (And he’s the star too!) It’s brisk and unpredictable, always zigzagging from genre to genre. The tale starts out like Kafka’s Amerika, with a wide-eyed immigrant, our Lorre, on a liner cruising past the Statue of Liberty, on his way to unforeseeable opportunities in the west. Lorre plays the new American with a succession of acting styles that permute as rapidly as the film’s careening genres, which freely shift the storytelling cadences from coming-of-age narrative to crime film, romantic melodrama, fairytale and even revenge legend, all while defining a nation. It’s a B-movie wonder!