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The Crooked Way is a 1949 American film noir starring John Payne, Sonny Tufts and Ellen Drew. Directed by Robert Florey and shot by John Alton, the film has a similar plot (a war hero loses his memory from a combat wound) to another film noir Somewhere in the Night.
At the time of its release, The Crooked Way was mostly ignored or dismissed as a routine B-movie crime melodrama but The New York Times was more mixed, calling it "....an incredible melodrama bursting with violence..."
- Robert Florey, Horace Hough
- John Payne
Nov 4, 2016 · When The Crooked Way was released in 1949, one critic gushed that it was “the most blood-thirsty crook melodrama in a long time.” If that ain’t enough of a recommendation for you, well, I just don’t know what. Distributed by United Artists, The Crooked Way stars John Payne as Eddie Rice, a veteran of WWII…
The Crooked Way: Directed by Robert Florey. With John Payne, Sonny Tufts, Ellen Drew, Rhys Williams. War hero recovers from amnesia and is confronted by his criminal past.
- (1.4K)
- Crime, Drama, Film-Noir
- Robert Florey
Robert Florey’s amnesia noir, The Crooked Way, is brutal and dark, both physically and morally, a tale of lost identity exaggerated beautifully by John Alton’s expressionistic cinematography.
The Crooked Way is directed by Robert Florey and adapted to screenplay by Richard H. Landau from the Radio Play “No Blade Too Sharp” by Robert Monroe. It stars John Payne, Sonny Tufts, Ellen Drew, Rhys Williams, Harry Bronson and Hal Baylor.
The Crooked Way exhibits the classic elements of film noir -- a morally ambiguous protagonist, a femme fa-tale, a grim, brutal story, and the most starkly shadowed and obliquely angled cinematography found in any movie.
