The Big Shot

Duke Berne used to be somebody and now he is a man with three convictions. A fourth would mean a life sentence, so he is afraid of going back to crime. But his past will not let go and his old associates keep at him, and he ends up in the planning of an armoured car robbery. Lewis Seiler tells it in flashback, and inside it are a wrongful conviction, a heist that falls apart and the reappearance of an old love. It comes late in the run of gangster parts Humphrey Bogart played at Warner. The interesting thing about it is that what pushes the man back into crime is not need but the pressure of the people around him.