A Life at Stake

The real-life deportation of gangster Lucky Luciano was the inspiration for this romanticized and slightly crackbrained crime drama. Jeff Chandler plays the Luciano counterpart, who once he arrives in Italy renews his criminal activities.

Based on the novel Low Company. One of the most peculiar film noirs of the 1940s stars Barry Sullivan as a small-time hood who suffers a mental breakdown as his big plans begin to crumble. Beautiful Belita is the slumming society girlfriend who only fuels his paranoia.

A married woman and a drifter fall in love, then plot to murder her husband.

Cleo Moore stars as Mary Adams, whose first step on the road to ruin is a $25,000 robbery. Mary hides the money, then confesses to the crime, secure in the belief that she can dig up the loot upon her release from prison.

Slick lawyer Thomas Farrell has made a career of defending mobsters in trials. It's not until he meets a lovely showgirl at a mob party that he realizes that there's more to life than winning trials. Farrell tries to quit the racket, but mob boss Rico Angelo threatens to hurt the showgirl if Farrell leaves him.

An insurance man wishing for a more exciting life becomes wrapped up in the affairs of an imprisoned embezzler, his model girlfriend, and a violent private investigator.

Rick Mason is the no-good lowdown rat who tries to capitalize on postwar patriotism and grief. He finagles a war widow into giving up her savings for a nonexistent memorial. When Mason falls in love with the widow he has pangs of conscience, but he reckons without his con-artist boss, who tends to bolster his arguments with muscle and bullets.

A private detective foils the plans of villains attempting to take over Panamanian oilfields when he hides a valuable map in plain sight.

The proprietor of an ice-skating revue promotes a peanut-vendor to a management position based on suggestions he made to improve the act of the show's star, who also happens to be the owner's wife. However, he soon begins to notice that his new manager is paying more attention to his wife than he believes is appropriate.

Genial shopkeeper Philip has to endure the constant nagging of a shrewish wife while he secretly yearns for a pretty young stenographer. When the henpecking gets to be too much, Philip murders his wife and manages to make her death look like an accident. A ruthless blackmailer and a low-key detective both discover Philip's secret, and he has to decide which of them poses the more dangerous threat.

Hoping to convince his wife that a promotion across the country could change their lives, Brian takes her on a trip to a faded resort town where they once honeymooned. Here, Brian is forced to examine his own marriage, fears, and integrity.