Follow Me Quietly

Whenever it rains in the city, a strangler who calls himself The Judge goes looking for someone new. He has been working the nights for months, leaving clues behind, and the police have nothing. Lieutenant Harry Grant has a life-size dummy of the killer built from what little is known about him, and the case turns into an obsession; the reporter Ann Gorman follows him everywhere, waiting to break it first. Richard Fleischer made this in sixty minutes on almost no money, and it is one of the leanest films noir there is. Rain, empty industrial buildings and that faceless dummy give it a dread far above its budget. Fleischer went on to much larger pictures, but rarely to one that got this much out of so little.