Night Editor

A newspaper's night editor tells his poker table an old story. At the centre of it are a married homicide detective and his mistress, parked on a lonely road when they witness a killing. He cannot go after the man and he cannot report what he saw, because saying it would mean explaining what he was doing there. Then the investigation is handed to him. Henry Levin made this in sixty eight minutes for Columbia in 1946, adapted from a radio programme of the same name, and it sits at the cheap end of the noir cycle, which is usually where the moral trap is built tightest. Janis Carter plays the mistress as one of the coldest figures the genre produced.