Lang's last Hollywood movie is one of his most single-minded studies of
the fallibility of justice. The plot is one of his most devilish
concoctions as a writer plants evidence suggesting that he is guilty of
murder in order to show the dangers of the death penalty; of course, he
ends up facing the chair for real... Lang's visual mastery is muted by
the flat, rather televisual style (this was shot on the smallest of
budgets), but the film has an absolute terseness and concentration; it
unfolds, in David Thomson's words, as "the proof of a savage
theorem".
