In The Night Runner (1957), a fascinating (but terribly sad) film, a discharged mental patient seeking a new life gets off at a seaside bus stop on the California coast, and is directed to a cottages-style motel up the road, proceeding to walk there. But this is the start of his trouble in that town, since both a policeman and the motel owner become immediately and deeply suspicious of him, not from any manifestation of his illness, but because he is a PEDESTRIAN. Both refer disparagingly to his carlessness.

Only 12 years earlier, Dana Andrews gets off a bus at another California coastal town in Fallen Angel, and his being without a car is neither here nor there. But 1957, this is prosperous postwar America, man, get with the program! The Night Runner exposes something that would remain a reality: For a man (especially) to be without a car anywhere in the United States except maybe Manhattan and San Francisco would be perceived as a sign of loserdom and just somehow deeply weird. As bad as having been a mental patient, perhaps.

Another point of interest: For my money, the film’s central action is not its lone murder, but the stealing, opening, and reading of someone else’s mail. This strikes me as incredibly low and scummy, yet the perpetrator seems to feel that simply because he wants to do it, that makes it OK. So when he becomes a victim himself, I for one was like, don’t let the door hit you on the way out. The murder is at least provoked. The reading of the mail, purely malevolent, is not.