At the centre of Rossen's film noir debut feature is Dick Powell's hard bitten Johnny, a casino manager and junior partner in a gambling club who has a selfish streak a mile wide. O'Clock gets up late, always looks after number one, and has enjoyed a twenty year partnership with club owner Pete Marchettis. To him - as he confesses to Nancy - a new roulette wheel is just as attractive as a woman. But there are cracks in his icy façade. He's had an affair with Marchetti's wife and she still wants him back. O'Clock's weakness (if one can see it like that) is the underlying humanity in his makeup, an eventual need for affection in the arms of a woman. Although resolutely cold to Mrs Marchetti, the death of the Hobbs sister and his growing distaste for the cop Blaydon (elegantly conveyed in the discarded-sandwich scene they share close to the start of the film) gradually reveal his emotional feet of clay. In fact Blaydon reflects many of the unpleasant aspects of O'Clock's character, ones which could so easily come to dominate his personality: total greed and emotional coldness. The resolute Inspector Koch (Lee J. Cobb in an excellent cigar-chomping heavy performance) is hounding them both and, despite his casual coolness, we feel that inside O'Clock is secretly nettled by a feeling of oncoming nemesis.

Optimism and pessimism fight it out Between Midnight and Dawn, an entertaining and well-crafted crime melodrama from 1950. These competing worldviews are embodied in the characters of prowl-car officers Rocky Barnes (Mark Stevens) and Dan “Pappy” Purvis (Edmond O’Brien). After having bonded as Marines on Guadalcanal, the pair returned to Los Angeles and a continued partnership as cops. The laid-back and gregarious Rocky came through his war in better shape than Dan, who in typical Edmond O’Brien fashion is bitter, cynical, and brooding. Dan has trouble seeing the world in anything other than black and white — people are either all good or all bad, as he says to Rocky in a telling early exchange, “Wait until you’ve had your fill of the scum. Slugging, knifing, shooting holes in decent people. You’ll toughen up, junior.”

The film opens with an especially noirish sequence where Rocky and Dan respond to a report of suspicious activity at a warehouse. They discover two young women in a parked car on the lonely street outside the run down building, doing a piss-poor job looking out for their beaus up to no good inside. Rocky and Dan put the bracelets on the girls and make for the warehouse. Inside, they corner the suspects and short gunfight ensues — Rocky grazes one of the youths with a shot from his service piece. Back at the station, the delinquents put on a tough act, but one of the girls falls apart, pleading and “blubbering” (per Dan) to be let go. Though Rocky wonders about justice for a wayward teenager, it’s plain that age and gender don’t carry any water with Dan — stone-faced as the hysterical girl is taken into custody, screaming over and over “I don’t want to go to jail!” as she’s dragged away.

The scene does much to establish the competing personalities of the two partners, as well as the noir milieu of Between Midnight and Dawn. Although the dark visual framework of the picture is thoroughly realized by noir stalwart George Diskant (The Narrow Margin, On Dangerous Ground), the narrative is just as distinctive. Rocky and Dan live in an uncertain world of deteriorating values in which people are not what they appear to be. Two innocent-looking girls in a parked car are engaged in larceny, shop owners live in fear of all-powerful criminals, and children in the street are as prone to violence as hardened felons. Even the most innocent character in the film, love interest Kate Mallory (Gale Storm), initially deceives the pair — though her fib is understandable: as the daughter of an old-guard Irish cop who was gunned down in the line of duty, Kate, who works as a dispatcher, is reluctant to begin a relationship with the infatuated Rocky, who has quietly fallen in love with her sultry voice, which he hears each night through the prowl car’s radio.