As usual Eddie Muller did an excellent job of introducing Hell Bound on his weekly Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies, putting it in the context of the work of low-budget producers Howard W. Koch and Aubrey Schenck as well as the history of film noir, coming to an end with Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly in 1955 and Orson Welles's Touch of Evil in 1958. By 1957 and 1958 the memory of WW II and even the Korean War was fading and more and more movies were being made in color and widescreen because of the competition of TV, war memories and black-and-white being important elements of film noir.
With the low-budget Hell Bound in 1957 film noir goes out with exaggerated elements of cynicism and darkness. It starts out with an off-kilter film by Jordan (John Russell) projected for a mob boss to raise money for a complicated heist of drugs from a navy ship. The mob boss donates his girlfriend Paula (former Playboy bunny June Blair) to help with the plot, though when Paula takes her shoes off (which she often does) to seduce Jordan he just slaps her down, eventually stabbing her and substituting his own girlfriend after Paula falls for ambulance driver Eddie (Stuart Whitman). Jordan gets a layout of the ship he plans to rob and then kills the crew member he paid for it. He also recruits a health officer and a junkie to help with his complicated plot, the health officer paid off and the junkie blackmailed. The heist does not go well.
The sleaziness of the film is considerably enhanced by the decrepit locations where the film takes place, especially a junkyard of Los Angeles streetcars piled high(the LA trolley system was abandoned under pressure from freeway builders and car manufacturers), a powerful symbol of the changes happening to Los Angeles in the fifties.
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