This film made Alan Ladd a star; without it, we might have been cheering for James Stewart or somebody else those many years later in Shane. It is also the first pairing of Ladd and his leading lady of the 1940s, Veronica Lake. She was the same height as him, so the filmmakers constructed a platform for Ladd to walk on so he would look taller, even at 5' 5" tall. Notice how they are never shown full-length on screen together.

Ladd plays an emotionless killer with a Freudian childhood. His dad was a crook, his mom died, his aunt scarred him with a hot iron, and he killed her, spending the rest of his childhood in reform schools. He wears a trenchcoat and calls himself Raven now, so you know he's a bad mutha. He's a hired killer, and we see him early on murdering a chemist and his secretary. He was hired to do the job by Gates (Laird Cregor), a fat man who likes candy, but Gates pays him off with counterfeit money because his boss, Brewster (Tully Marshall), wants all of the loose ends cleaned up. Turns out Brewster is selling poison gas to the Nazis, and the victim at the beginning was blackmailing him.

Now we get those film noir coincidences. Raven escapes on a train carrying Ellen (Veronica Lake) who happens to be a singer in a club owned by Gates, she is engaged to the cop (Robert Preston) who is hunting Raven, and she's a spy for the government, trying to get evidence that Gates is a traitor. Whew. There's a great extended sequence at a freight yard, where Raven takes Ellen hostage after the cops show up. They get to know each other, fall in love (kinda, although he's not really capable of it), and she convinces him to get a confession from Gates instead of simply killing him.

The movie is enjoyable, although the plot is a little incredible and Ladd isn't the most charming leading man in the world. A lot of the conventions of the film noir genre were developed in this film: the trenchcoat, the femme fatale who is working for everyone and no one, the labyrinthine plot, the main character's personal code of honor, etc. It veers from goofy to incredibly dark, but overall it is worth watching, if only to see the roots of two cornerstones of 1940s film: Lake/Ladd, and film noir.