Excellent, smart action film.

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

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

This is actually a very upsetting film, as the vile brutality and vicious corruption of Edmond O'Brien is difficult to associate with such a brilliant actor. It's a sinister drama of police corruption that hardly could be more dark and depressive. The fall of the protagonist into constantly deeper darkness and hopelessness of moral bankruptcy is almost unbearable. Still, there are some brighter spots. Carolyn Jones as a bar blonde at hand for comfort when the abyss gapes open is the one element of comedy in the film, and that whole spaghetti scene is paramount and the best of the film. There are some other scenes approaching it, like when he goes berserk at a public bath being both chased and chasing his own desperate destiny, and of course it can only end one way. It's one of the darkest noirs ever, but pay special attention to Emile Meyer as Captain Gunnarson. You'll never again see a cop like that. He actually runs the show and knows from the beginning the full extent of the troubles mounting and is the perfect realist to handle them. It's a great film worth watching to the end - if you can stand it.

By 1954 Film-Noir was starting to show signs of transforming to a style that had more to do with the sociological and less to do with the psychological. Although the bad cop here definitely has had a psychotic break, the film is concerned more with the external ramifications and less with the internal intent and motivation.A crisp looking and sometimes brutal Police Story finds that dangling the man's "Castle" in front of him may not always be enough to entice some to play by the rules. It seems that even nine years on the force has not paid enough to comfortably attain the American Dream. Even his lady friend seeks employment as a leggy cigarette girl to pay the bills.There may be one too many lines reassuring us that this type of cop is really an anomaly, and when we do find one we will tell all and call in the press (yeah right). But aside from this and a preachy reporter (we know he's a righteous man because he smokes a pipe) this is quite a good hard-boiled thriller with noble intent.

In Shield for Murder (a movie he co-directed with Howard Koch), Edmond O'Brien plays a Los Angeles cop `gone sour.' Bloated and sweaty, he's a sneak preview of another bad apple – Orson Welles in Touch of Evil. In a pre-title sequence, he guns down a drug runner in cold blood, relieves the corpse of an envelope crammed with $25-thou, then yells `Stop or I'll shoot' for the benefit of eavesdroppers before firing twice into the air. When his partner (John Agar) arrives, there's only a few hundred dollars left on the body, and it looks like a justifiable police action – though O'Brien's shock tactics have already drawn the unwelcome attention of his new captain (Emile Meyer).O'Brien wants the money to buy into the American Dream – to put a down-payment on a tract house, furnished (oddly enough) right down to the table settings. It's a bungalow to share with his girl, Marla English, as well as a handy place to bury his cash in its yard. But a couple of things go wrong. First off, a local crime boss wants back the loot O'Brien ripped off and dispatches a couple of goons to retrieve it. Then, though there were no eye-witnesses to the murder, there was in fact an eavesdropper – an old blind man whose acute hearing picked up a sequence of shots that don't add up to the official story. When this good citizen decides to tell the police what he heard, O'Brien decides to pay him a nocturnal visit.... Based on a novel by William McGivern (who also wrote the books from which The Big Heat, Rogue Cop and Odds Against Tomorrow were drawn), Shield For Murder embodies some of the shifts in tone and emphasis the noir cycle was showing as it wound down. Its emphasis is less on individuals caught up in circumstance than on widespread public corruption; its tone is less suggestive than ostentatiously violent. The movie ratchets up to a couple of brutal set-pieces. In one, O'Brien, knocking back doubles at the bar in a spaghetti cellar, is picked up by a floozie (Carolyn Jones, in what looks like Barbara Stanwyck's wig from Double Indemnity). `You know what's the matter with mirrors in bars?' she asks him. `Men always make hard faces in them.' While she eats, he continues to drink. When the goons track him down there, O'Brien savagely pistol-whips one of them (Claude Akins) to the horror of the other patrons who had come to devour their pasta in peace. Later, there's an attempted pay-off (and a double-cross) in a public locker-room and swimming-pool that ends in carnage. It's easy to dismiss Shield For Murder – it has a seedy B-picture look and a literalness that typified most of the crime films of the Eisenhower administration. But it's grimly effective – almost explosive.

I cannot say that this is one of the better films noir, but it's a good example of the way this kind of film was drifting in the early fifties: away from the studios; toward independent production; more cars, fewer subways; a vaguely documentary air, ala Jack Webb, rather than the more elegant stylization we associate with the forties; more outdoor scenes, fewer cramped rooms; and overall a movement away from the Gothic and toward a more contemporary, which is to say paranoid mood. Having said this, it ain't a bad picture. Edmond O'Brien (who also had a hand behind the camera) plays a basically decent and fair cop who gives in to temptation and steals some money from a bad guy. He pays dearly for his transgression. O'Brien is edgier and tougher than usual; the rest of the cast is okay. This is an extremely watchable film. It involves you more than most police thrillers. I enjoyed it thoroughly.