Alfred L. Werker’s He Walked by Night (1948) wastes no time establishing the ordinary world of Los Angeles. Stock shots of the city accompanied by accompanied by voice-of-god narration by Reed Hadley, let us know that L.A. is, among other things, “a mecca for tourists, a stopover for transients, a target for gangsters, a haven for those fleeing from winter, a home for the hardworking” and “a city holding the hopes and dreams of over 2 million people.” This opening is followed by more stock shots of policemen hard at work, their efforts instrumental in keeping the people of LA safe.
It doesn’t take long for that ordinary world to be pierced by violence: a potential burglar draws the suspicion of a policeman (John McGuire) and responds with gunfire, mortally wounding the officer. The killer, Roy Morgan/Martin (Richard Basehart), spends his days in a Hollywood bungalow and his nights committing crimes. He soon graduates from burglaries to robberies, and has no problem shooting anyone who gets in his way. The police have no idea who this criminal is, but he certainly seems to know a lot about police procedures.
Since the audience knows from the opening minutes who the criminal is, the film’s plot is mainly concerned with bringing the police to the same state of knowledge so they can return the world to its normal state by removing the offender from circulation. This is a progression also seen in many murder mysteries, especially of the cozy variety—all is well in a community, then a murder shatters the veil of the ordinary world, then the killer is caught and things go back to normal because everything else was perfectly OK all along.
He Walked by Night is really two films in one. The first is a police procedural shot in a semi-documentary style, a fictional representation of how the police go about their work in real life. The second is a more impressionistic film noir for the scenes featuring Basehart’s character, which are loaded with fog and shadows and canted angles and Venetian blinds. This dichotomy of styles establishes Martin/Morgan as someone living outside “normal” society, as may well have been the case for his real-life prototype, Erwin “Machine Gun” Walker. Walker, a traumatized World War II vet probably suffering from PTSD, went on a crime spree in Los Angeles in 1945 and 1945. Like the fictional Morgan/Martin, Walker used his expertise in electronics and his knowledge of police procedures (he had worked as a police dispatcher before the war) to evade capture (until he didn’t).
Location shooting is one of my favorite things about low-budget films of this period—in the process of telling a story, they capture images of the lived environment of a city and preserve them for future generations, safe from the wrecking ball and the forces of so-called urban renewal. He Walked by Night includes a lot of famous locations, such as Los Angeles City Hall and Union Station, but also more obscure venues like the bungalow court* on Santa Monica Boulevard where the Morgan/Martin spends his days (and Dorothy Adams believes someone is poisoning her milk).
Thanks in large part to the cinematography of John Alton, plus a standout cast (Whit Bissell and Scott Brady besides those already mentioned), and some uncredited direction by Anthony Mann (no one knows for sure, but many believe he directed the noir sequences), He Walked by Night is an effective film that is still enjoyable to watch today. It’s also historically important because it helped establish many conventions for police procedurals and beat Carol Reed’s The Third Man by a year in shooting an important action sequence in a municipal sewer/storm sewer system. It also provided Jack Webb, who makes his film debut playing a crime technician, the inspiration for the radio series Dragnet (a franchise that expanded to include several television and movies). The similarities between Dragnet and He Walked by Night are many and obvious, from the naive trust in the goodness of police departments and absolute trust in technology to reveal the truth to the catch phrase “names have been changed to protect the innocent.” | Sarah Boslaugh
* Fun fact: developers and politicians alike are showing renewed interest in bungalow courts today as a way to provide housing that combines the benefits of individual houses and yards with the ability to house far more people per miles than is possible under most suburban zoning codes.
He Walked by Night is distributed on Blu-ray by Kino Lorber. The Blu-ray was created from a new HD master, using a 4K scan of the 35mm film, and it looks pretty good, with only occasional softness in the image. The disc includes two audio commentaries, one by film historian Imogen Sara Smith and one by author and film historian Alan K. Rode and writer and film historian Julie Kirgo.
