"Richard Widmark’s finest moment. Jules Dassin’s too. Following the ten-cent dreams of a five-cent loser to become a wrestling promoter in the seedy London underworld, Widmark and Dassin locate the authentic heart of noir: working-class tragedy played out for Shakespearean stakes."

"I saw this at the Thalia, probably in the middle of winter. Heat was not its specialty. Richard Widmark manages to portray himself as twisted, conniving, pathological, sleazy, tragic, vulnerable, and handsome all at once in most of the movies I’ve seen him in, and never more exquisitely than in this, one of my favorite film noirs. Though I must confess, I’ve never seen Rollercoaster."

"Jules Dassin’s tour of the London underworld glistens with inky blacks, swirls of smoke, pockets of isolated light, a mise-en-scène broken into Mondrianesque squares, and stunning performances by Francis L. Sullivan, Googie Withers, a Greek wrestler named Zbyszko, and, in the defining performance of a career that ought to get one of those sorry-we-overlooked-you lifetime-achievement Oscars, Richard Widmark, who indulges a brief moment of elation by hurtling a stair railing to affect an incongruous pose of Chaplinesque delight."

"I remember being baffled by the first Sam Fuller film I saw when I was in my late teens or early twenties, a revival at the old St. Mark’s theater on Second Avenue in New York. The audience was guffawing and cheering and I thought it was really stupid: some kind of condescending intellectual slumming, about a movie that looked to me like plain harmless, and pretty much sincere, if inept, cheap melodramatic exposé. It was Shock Corridor. The movie was bad, but the audience was worse. I can’t remember which film turned me around. The Naked Kiss? That’s a great one, as is Shock Corridor. Eventually I also learned how highly Fuller is rated by the most intellectual film analysts. I think what makes Fuller so popular with them is Fuller’s unpretentiousness, not because it’s naive, but because it makes him a purer example of filmmaking talent: since there’s no subtlety, no subtext, no self-consciousness, it means that to enjoy it you’ve got to enjoy it for the pure, abstract methods of film as film. Famously, his roots are in two realms, tabloid journalism and World War II (where he saw a lot of action with the infantry). In a scene at a party in Godard’s Pierrot le fou, when he’s asked what cinema is, he says, “Film is like a battleground: love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word: emotion.” And that’s the way his films feel: like they’re emotion, the way music is. They’re not about ideas except on the most basic level, like a tabloid. They’re “hard-boiled,” and there’s tabloid/sensationalist fury and irony. His fight scenes are thrilling and like no one else’s; you can recognize them in a second. His style altogether is distinctive. Everything is in your face. Lots of close-ups, lots of tracking in for close-ups, long takes with plenty of camera movement. It is like pulp journalism, like a fluid Weegee. Emotion. As corny and cartoony as she is, Thelma Ritter’s last scene in this is really moving. She actually got an Academy Award nomination for supporting actress for the role. The close-up smooching of Richard Widmark and Jean Peters can leave you breathless too, even though the sessions usually end with him mocking or slapping her. In 1974, when I was first singing my song “Love Comes in Spurts” at CBGB, I sometimes used to introduce it with the line that comes when Widmark’s kissed an eager Peters and she’s told him she really likes him and he sneers, “Everybody likes everybody when they’re kissing.”