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Actress Ida Lupino became an accidental auteur when director Elmer Clifton suffered a heart attack three days into the production of this independent feature, which Lupino cowrote (with later blacklistee Paul Jarrico) and coproduced. It was the beginning of a second career for Lupino, who quietly became the only woman director working in Hollywood in the 1950s. Lupino effortlessly transfers the unsentimental pragmatism of her screen character to this surprisingly distanced account of an unhappy young woman (newcomer Sally Forrest) who runs away from her stifling small-town home. She dreams of joining the surly, sexy jazz pianist (Leo Penn, in a performance that strikingly anticipates the work of his son Sean) but has to settle for the fey attentions of boyish gas-pump jockey Keefe Brasselle, whose idea of fun runs more to toy trains and merry-go-rounds. Lupino uses extremely long takes to highlight the character's sense of isolation and entrapment, but her standoffish camera never allows the film to descend to melodramatic pathos, even when the girl discovers she's pregnant and seeks refuge in a prisonlike home for unwed mothers. Among the film's many astonishing protofeminist moments is a vision of childbirth as blurry expressionist nightmare.
--Dave Kehr
