The Man I Love may not even be a true noir, every character in this story has a clear control over their fate and by each's own choice decides to go down an unhappy road, no fate or bad luck comes into play for these individuals. It lacks the hard boiled style of a Phil Karlson picture, and for that matter, how surprising is it to see that it's director happens to be Raoul Walsh, the Raoul Walsh who gave us the raw and realistic They Drive by Night (also featuring Lupino and co-star Alan Hale) and the brutal, ultra hard boiled gangster-noir hybrid White Heat. Who'd have thought that, for a director who seems to save any sort of sentimentality until his films final moments, would give us a whole picture full of characters whom only seemed to have felt melancholy, wistfulness, and regret? This is not the noir of the class of Spillane, nor is it of some sort of poetic tragedy like that of Out of the Past, but this is like something out of Edward Hopper's Nighthawks painting, all about a group of unhappy people in the big city...and if that isn't as noir as the former two, what is?