Roadblock

Joe Peters, an insurance investigator, has worked honestly for years and lived by the rules. Then he meets a woman who wants a comfortable life, and sees that what she wants cannot be bought on his salary. Once he breaks the arithmetic there is no way back; the knowledge from the files he investigates now gets used a different way. A cheap, fast noir of seventy-three minutes. Harold Daniels' production spends no time on decoration: the man's collapse is complete within a few scenes, and the tension comes entirely from when he will be caught. Charles McGraw's hard face and low voice are exactly right for the part. Sequences shot on real locations in the streets of Los Angeles give the film a more genuine texture than most B productions of the period.