In this intense film from that poet of the misfit, Nicholas Ray, an unstable urban cop (Robert Ryan) is sent out to the country to investigate the murder of a schoolgirl. There he encounters two people who have an unsettling effect on him: the dead girl’s father (Ward Bond), whose hunger for revenge echoes the cop’s own innate violence; and the chief suspect’s blind sister (Ida Lupino), who senses the loneliness behind the hero’s stern exterior. Herrmann was very partial to the picture and produced an imaginative and unusual score, particularly in his use of a viola d’amore for the heroine and his braying horns during the hunt for the killer.