Cry Danger
Directed by Robert ParrishRocky Mulloy (Dick Powell) walks out of San Quentin after serving five years for a robbery and murder he insists he did not commit. His alibi arrives late, in the form of a one-legged carnival veteran named Delong (Richard Erdman), whose account is thin enough to raise suspicions even as it secures Rocky's release. Rocky returns to Los Angeles with two things on his mind: finding the $100,000 from the original job and clearing his name permanently. He locates Nancy Morgan (Rhonda Fleming), the wife of his still-imprisoned partner, living in a trailer court and surviving on what little the neighborhood affords. The attraction between them is immediate and compromised from the start.
Rocky begins pressing the local machinery – a racketeer named Louie Castro (William Conrad) and a tame police detective, Gus Cobb (Regis Toomey) – looking for the man who actually committed the crime and pocketed the money. Delong, proving more liability than asset, attaches himself to Darlene (Jean Porter), a sharp-tongued woman from the same trailer park, while Rocky maneuvers through threats and evasions. Allegiances shift under pressure: Nancy's loyalties are divided between a husband in prison and a man from that husband's past, and the missing money exerts its own gravitational pull on nearly everyone Rocky trusts.
Cry Danger belongs to the cycle of postwar noirs built around the wrongly convicted man who returns from confinement to find the world has rearranged itself in his absence. It shares that preoccupation with institutional failure – the law convicts the wrong man, releases him imperfectly, and offers no restoration. Powell, who had already reshaped his screen identity with Murder, My Sweet seven years earlier, carries Rocky with a worn-down wariness that suits the material: a man who has already been through the worst the system can do and expects no favors from what follows.
