It's a brutal little film, to be sure. Mark clearly lays out a series of caveats about it in what he wrote that suggest the film pushes itself close to the edge of hard-boiled parody by putting its foot on the scale more than once too often. Still, he shows more than a grudging amount of admiration for it, which might stem from a particular orientation towards "B-noir," which he seemed to be drawn to writing about. A "melo-noir" it ain't, with a 74 "melo" score (112 is the average for the ~800 American noirs in the "noir-o-meter" ledgers) and a hard-boiled character score of 146 (as opposed to the average score of 89).
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