Edward L. Cahn's Main Street After Dark (1945)

 I've written about a number of Edward L. Cahn's films on this blog.  He started as an editor at Universal in the silent days and went on to direct a number of excellent films there in the thirties (including Law and Order and Afraid to Talk in 1932) and then got on someone's bad side and was fired, turning to MGM in the shorts department before turning to features again with Main Street After Dark and then turning to Poverty Row low-budget films, never losing his visual skills, making eleven films in 1961, for instance, before dying in 1963.

Main Street After Dark is an unusual film noir, made while the war was still on and starring later icons of the form Dan Duryea and Audrey Totter.  They are part of a gang run by their mother, played by Selena Royle.  They specialize in getting sailors drunk before relieving them of their wallets.  Once Totter's husband Lefty (Tom Trout) gets out of stir he escalates the operation until Lefty kills a bar owner on the owner's way to the bank with his receipts.   Detective Lorrgan (Edward Arnold) confronts the family in their home when ultraviolent light reveals that the family has touched the money that Lorrgan had given to soldiers.  There is a brief didactic ending about stopping crime, betraying the films origin in MGM's "Crime Does Not Pay" series.  Main Street After Dark is 56 minutes long, obviously intended for the bottom of a double bill, but Cahn uses his excellent cast (Hume Cronyn plays a crooked pawnbroker) and his florid visual style (Jackson Rose was the cinematographer) to portray a dark (the film takes place mostly during nighttime) and dangerously claustrophobic space that gradually closes in on the criminal family.