Although the outline is taken from "crime and punishment" , the unexpected twist will remind the viewer of "woman in the window"(1944) .
The movie makes the best of a small budget ; the scene of the crime in the pawnbroker/professor 's flat is particularly well directed ; all happens in dark rooms , and a cop,as zealous as Javert in "les miserables " ,will not leave his suspect alone ; the ending although borrowed from Fritz Lang's movie does make sense in a way : bizarre clues are given to the viewer : the godsend the hero receives , the painter who confesses the crime , a college professor as a pawnbroker ..... There's also this feeling to be above the law ,to eliminate the "inferiors " ,an awful ideology which would be developed in Fleischer's "compulsion" (1959) and Hitchcock's "rope" (1948) ,both based on real events .
The movie makes the best of a small budget ; the scene of the crime in the pawnbroker/professor 's flat is particularly well directed ; all happens in dark rooms , and a cop,as zealous as Javert in "les miserables " ,will not leave his suspect alone ; the ending although borrowed from Fritz Lang's movie does make sense in a way : bizarre clues are given to the viewer : the godsend the hero receives , the painter who confesses the crime , a college professor as a pawnbroker ..... There's also this feeling to be above the law ,to eliminate the "inferiors " ,an awful ideology which would be developed in Fleischer's "compulsion" (1959) and Hitchcock's "rope" (1948) ,both based on real events .