This classic film noir about a cop's obsessive quest to avenge his
wife's murder is at once one of Lang's most brutal and most
compassionate films. He disturbingly details the incursion of
criminality into a peaceful domestic milieu, and initiates a descent
into a purgatory where lost souls brush against each other. This is a
bleak, haunting film. Though it takes place offscreen, the famous
scene in which Marvin throws scalding coffee into the face of Gloria
Grahame remains one of the cinema's most harrowing moments of
violence, above all because Lang is concerned more with its
psychological than its merely physical effects.
