Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

This fast-paced and reasonably well-written noir is rare for a few reasons. One is simply that it's hard to find. Another is that it was shot on location in Brazil. Rarest perhaps is that quintessential noir bad boy Lawrence Tierney plays the hero for once.Tierney, whose off-screen escapades rivaled those of the characters he played, had worn out his welcome in Hollywood by this time, but his performance here shows he could easily have become a leading man in action films. However, according to Wikipedia "In just seven years between 1944 and 1951, Tierney was arrested over a dozen times for brawling, frequently for drunkenness."Here he plays an American engineer on assignment in a Brazilian river town. The familiar plot is one that was a favorite of Alfred Hitchcock among others: the innocent man, framed for a murder he didn't commit, tracking down the real killer, although in this case both the framing and tracking are accidental.There's also the woman met along the way who believes him and helps conceal him, here a lackluster performance, perhaps intentional for a rather passive role, by little-known Marissa O'Brien.At one point he joins an exploited plantation work gang, so there's even a bit of social commentary. A must-see, if you can find it, for Tierney cultists.