The High Wall is a reflection --another one -- of the disillusionment of war veterans and their concern that their wives were cheating on them while they were away. In film noir we can never really get away from the heavy subject matter. It's all here: suicide, murder, lust, adultery. A cornucopia of sins.
--Wampa 12, The Film Noir Bible, 2003
In the forties and fifties romantic lead Robert Taylor effectively branched out into film noir, gangster films and war films, using all the resources of MGM, generally not known for genre films. The High Wall was directed by German émigré Curtis Bernhardt with a fatalism rather like that of Fritz Lang , written by newspaperman Sidney Boehm (who scripted Lang's corrosive The Big Heat in 1953) and Hollywood Ten member Lester Cole, photographed mostly in inky darkness by Paul Vogel, and starring Robert Taylor, Audrey Totter as the femme fatale and Herbert Marshall, a skillful and austere actor who could do comedy (Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise, 1932) as well as melodrama.
The High Wall (the title perhaps refers not only to the mental hospital where much of the film takes place but also the wall between people and the wall between the truth and lies) starts with Herbert Marshall drinking by himself in a bar, switches to Taylor and his dead wife speeding in a motorcar at night in the rain and ends on another rainy and dark night as Taylor and Totter seek the true killer of Taylor's wife while Taylor is getting ready for trial. In between are moving scenes with the inmates of the asylum (2500 inmates and only 12 doctors) as well as the attendants, who spend their time sleeping and smoking; shyster lawyers;, a blackmailing apartment superintendent;, distraught mothers and children. The ending is only superficially happy, with Totter and Taylor kissing in the hope that love will save the day.
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