Year: 1945 Rating: **
Ann Savage's famous femme fatale would be the kind of classic Noir character had she entered the picture earlier on...
Instead, during Tom Neal's story as he, a low-rent piano player, hitchhikes from New York to L.A. to see his girl who's trying to make it big in Hollywood, Savage's Phoenix AZ con-artist babbler simply kills the self-narrated road movie buzz that'd belonged more comfortably to the far more subtle and intriguing Neal...
Her incessant bickering is annoying while
their collected con (that HE'S bickered into) is so far-fetched you'll
wish poor Tom did what he initially promised: Instead of thumbing the ride
that'd changed his life and given Savage the chance to blackmail him, to
make the whole trip across country all alone, by himself, on a
pogo-stick.
