It has all the typical ingredients of a standard noir: crime, misery, blackmail, murder, motivation of money, scoundrels and at least one honest chap who commits the mistake of falling in love with the wrong woman, who is a racketeer, has always been so and is deeply involved with racketeers, as she officially but not legally is married to one of the worst of them, a completely ruthless criminal. We are used to see Anne Baxter in such roles, they were the kind of roles she was an expert on, she usually played them out with great passion, and so she does here with a vengeance. Sterling Hayden is the honest man, a fisherman, who isn't stupid but he is too sunken in love not to be bogged down in the confusion of it. John Hoyt is convincing enough as the villain, you hate him from the beginning and there are no mitigating circumstances in anything he does, you simply can't expect anything of him but the worst, which is what he delivers. Anne Baxter's luckless character does have mitigating circumstances though, she was somehow born out of luck which always has kept hounding her, and which she desperately tries to sort herself out of, while she only succeeds in making it worse. She is a tragic figure.
