Film review: He Walked By Night (1948)

This reminded me a little of Murder By Contract, in that the central character is rather a cold cypher: methodical and much cleverer than most people around him but whose motives are unclear.  This one is also excellent, with some great noir cinematography and a steely central performance from Richard Basehart. The beginning is a little unpromising, with one of those voice-overs (that sounds distractingly like Phil Hartman) about how the teeming millions in the naked city are ever on the brink of anarchy or some such tosh.  But it does say something true: that this film is based on the criminal career of a real Los Angeles lawbreaker - one Erwin "Machine Gun" Walker (whose actual backstory is very tragic).  Our villain ("Roy") is first seen being caught trying to break into an electronics store (turns out he's a bit of an electronics whizz) and a cop follows him and asks him for his ID.  "Here's my army discharge papers" he says and pulls a gun and shoots the cop.  The cop does last long enough to ram Roy's car so that he has to escape on foot, but later goes into a coma and dies, making Roy very much a wanted man.  The car is found to have army electronics equipment and an arsenal of weapons in the trunk (the real felon wasn't called "Machine Gun" for nothing).  There follows a police procedural manhunt.  In the interim, Roy carries out a bewildering profusion of different crimes, with different MOs and different disguises.  (He initially has a pencil mustache, but was already shaving it off when he hears his description on his police scanner.)  Two things eventually bring about his downfall: trying to sell a stolen experimental TV projector to a guy who rents out his other inventions, and the fact that he once worked briefly for one of the LA Area police departments doing something to do with radios.  Eventually he is tracked to his bungalow, but his dog (his affection for which is his one redeeming feature) alerts him to the encircling police and he flees using the storm drains.  However, the cops park on top of all his exits and he is eventually brought down in a hail of gunfire.  Pretty gripping stuff, and Basehart's performance makes it (the cops are pretty generic, although you will probably recognize Dragnet's Jack Webb as the police science guy "Lee").  The real story of Erwin Walker is, if anything, more bizarre and melodramatic, so it's a shame that they changed/omitted so much.  Walker himself was captured and made a life for himself years later after prison, and only died in 2008 (his "crime spree," where his goal was to get electronics to build a ray gun to force the government to raise soldiers' wages enough so that war would become unprofitable (!) took place in 1946).