To me, this movie is perfection.

Great Film overall

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

While there isn't a lot of spectacular action or twists in this film, it is rock solid throughout--sort of like an episode of "Dragnet" or "The FBI". A very good script and nice attention to law enforcement details make this one worth watching.The film begins with two FBI agents on an assignment. One is unexpectedly murdered by someone hiding in the shadows. The surviving agent (Broderick Crawford) seems to think that someone on the other agents list of open cases has done the crime, so he looks into the three cases. And so, you see Crawford go from case to case--looking for clues and solving the cases while he's at it. It all leads to a dandy final set at the Hollywood sign.As I said above, the show is big on realism and police procedures. I also appreciated how ordinary and ugly some of the cast were--like real life. Overall, it's a lot like a tidier version of film noir--with a strong infusion of realism and good acting.By the way, if you do watch, look for the guy with his home-made 'spy detector'!

FBI story about Brodrick Crawford working three cases at once trying to find a killer who may also be an extortionist. First there's the criminal on the run who kills a gas station attendant. His va-va-voom semi floozie moll played by Martha Hyer is entertaining, Second story is an innocent caught up in a hot car ring afraid to squeal and his adroitly played blind wife, Marisa Pivan & finally single mom Ruth Roman who is being squeezed out of her dead husbands $10,000 life insurance payout under death threat of her young child. Crawford is intense & thorough yet soft & human toward victims. The film moves along briskly, never lags..very economical pace & direction. Lots of L.A. exteriors, good storyline and interwoven plots/characters. I found this exciting & suspenseful & was fooled by who the villain actually was due to red herrings so the final revelation was a part of the overall thrill, the climax taking place in Hollywood hills (is that vacant lot at the ice-cream truck scene the same one used in Strangers When We Meet where Kirk Douglas & Kim Novak rendevoux)? I never heard of this film, glad NETFLIX obtained it for instant streaming an was well worth the watch. Definitely check it out.

Broderick Crawford as Agent Ripley takes over three cases for a murdered FBI man in "Down Three Dark Streets," a 1954 film also starring Ruth Roman, Marisa Pavan, Martha Hyer, and Max Showalter.This is one of those police or FBI films done in semi-documentary style that abounded in the '50s. Each woman is involved in a crime; Roman is being threatened with her daughter's life if she doesn't turn over her late husband's insurance money; Pavan is the blind wife of a man jailed for being involved in car theft, but he won't reveal any information about the ring; and Hyer is the girlfriend of a wanted killer who is on the run. When two murders occur, Ripley is convinced they're tied to one of the cases, but which one? Great '50s LA sites are a highlight of this film, along with a suspenseful ending. The story involving Ruth Roman was done as a suspense movie by Blake Edwards later on as "Experiment in Terror" with Glenn Ford as Ripley.There is one major plot hole I must point out. One of the FBI men follows a character to a department store, where she takes a girdle to try on and goes into a dressing room. The operative asks if there's an exit behind the dressing rooms and is told yes, there's a staircase leading to a back entrance. Well, all I can say is, that store must have had hundreds of thousands of dollars in shoplifted merchandise yearly if that was the case.

***SPOILERS*** Pretty good FBI crime drama with Broaderick Crawford as FBI Agent John "Rip" Ripley on the trail of an on the loose killer who murdered his friend and fellow FBI Agent Zack Stewart, Kenneth Tobey.Finding out that the late Agent Stewart was involved in three separate cases it becomes evident that somehow one of the cases he was working on had to involved the man who murdered him. Agent Ripley soon comes to the conclusion that the case involving the extortion of widow Kate Martell, Ruth Roman, is the one that lead to Agent Stewart's murder and may possibly be connected in the two other cases he was involved in; A car robbery ring and the murder of a gas station attendant, William Schallert, on the Nevada Californian border!Using Mrs. Martell as bait Agent Ripley has her play along with her extortionist who want her to pay him off with the $10,000.00 of insurance money she got when her husband was killed in a fatal car accident. If Mrs. Martell doesn't comply he threatens to murder her nine year old daughter Vickie, Dede Grinor.It takes both good old fashion police work as well as the most up to date state of the art, circa 1954, police science to finally track down the both killer/extortionist. In the process of doing that Agent Riply also solves the two other cases,the car robbery ring and murder of the gas station attendant, as well. Even though they had nothing at all to do with both Agent Stewart and Brenda Rolles' (Suzanne Alexander), who knew who Stewarts killer was, murders.***SPOILER ALERT*** The films ending was a real hum dingier with the killer finally revealing himself as he appears out of the blue right under the famous Hollywood sign. It's there where he instructed Mrs. Martell to leave the extortion money. It was also there where Agent Ripley, without Mrs. Mantell knowledge, and his fellow FBI agents and the local police set a trap for him!P.S Interesting cast of unknowns who went on to bigger and better things later on in their film careers. Both Kenneth Tobey-who also stared in the sci-fi classic "The Thing" back in 1951-and Max Showalter were to make within two years, in 1955 & 1956, the classic bad sci-fi movie epics that were immortalized on TV-on shows like Mystery Science Fiction Theater 3000-in "It Came Form Beneath the Sea" and "The Indestructible Man". The murdered gas station attendant William Schallert was to later play the befuddled and out of touch, to what his zany daughter was doing, father of Patty Duke in the aptly named "Patty Duke Show". And the beefy and booming voiced Claud Akins was to finally make it all the way to top, as President of the United States, playing President Teddy Roosevelt in the 1992, two years before his untimely death of cancer, Sherlock Holmes movie "Incident at Victoria Falls".