Below is an excerpt from Scout Tafoya’s essay Crooked Ways for Savage Beasts, on the film The Crooked Way by director Robert Florey with cinematography by the great John Alton, included in the booklet of our upcoming 4K release of The Big Combo.

The sum total of American movies made in the 1940s consists to a great degree of movies much more interesting to research than watch, even given the increasingly meagre flow of studio histories written today. You have to go to the particularly dusty section of a given university library to find out about the bookkeeping of Monogram Studios, or the career of Harry L. Fraser, but it’s almost always worth it, when watching their output may be less than edifying. Robert Florey’s The Crooked Way is that rare film that’s both fascinating in context and wonderful to actually behold.

It sits at a crossroads of history between the rise in popularity of television and the shift from film capital to the fortunes of small screen producers. Not bad for a 90 minute noir with a director and stars better known for their prolific careers than any particular movie, probably the hundredth movie with the word “crooked” in the title. And yet everyone made this work distinct and eccentric and, thanks to photographer John Alton, jaw-droopingly beautiful.

The Crooked Way is about a veteran suffering from amnesia who discovers he is not the honorable Silver Star winner he’s become, but rather a vicious gangster who’s had his memories of murder cast into the fog. If the central conceit is pure gonzo noir, its anterior reality is more convincing. Psychoanalysis was, thanks to the practicality of Hollywood reacting to the influx of German Expressionist talent who fled the Nazis, who transformed crime dramas and horror films into classics through stark angles, long shadows, and geometric peculiarity.

Rendering neuroses cinematically was mostly the province of what would later be dubbed film noir (most famously in Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound, with its dream sequence designed by Salvador Dalí and realized by William Cameron Menzies), but it would be everywhere soon: melodrama, prison pictures, even comedies. Who better rendered the absurdities of mental unease than Jerry Lewis or Chuck Jones?

The Crooked Way is one of a few films that started the thaw of post-war propaganda with regard to the health of infantrymen returning from the Second World War. While doing his part in the U.S. Army Signal Corps, director John Huston (lately risen to the rank of Major) started visiting hospitals to see what was becoming of the men who saw hard combat. The sadistic cruelty of the Pacific Theatre and the visual evidence of genocide seeping out of Germany with every footstep toward the Eagle’s Nest; these were not sights and sounds even the most hardened soldier could have predicted.

Being asked to kill or be killed, to clean up the mess of mass murder wrought by heads of state, it was quite plainly having an effect on the stoic everyman. Huston went to Mason General Hospital in Deer Park, New York, on Long Island, and shot a documentary of the flailing and screaming psychosis of the returning vets. The film, Let There Be Light, was shelved for decades. Mental health in America would stay the stuff of noir (i.e. the business of criminals and heiresses, characters with whom most audiences weren’t supposed to relate).

By the time Frederick Wiseman arrived at Bridgewater State Hospital to film Titicut Follies in the late 60s and found guards torturing particularly troubled inmates, a conspiracy of silence formed around the business of caring for the disturbed. That film too was pulled from circulation for many decades thanks to injunctions from the state of Massachusetts. Huston, for his part, made a Freud biopic with script contributions by Jean-Paul Sartre, trying once more to get middlebrows to take psychoanalysis seriously.

The Crooked Way begins with a brief documentary montage of Letterman Army Hospital and its patients. The building was demolished in 2002 and the plot was sold to George Lucas, who built the Letterman Digital Arts Center on the site.

Our first proper image is a doozy: an x-ray of a skull, lit from within, followed by John Payne’s face in John Alton’s signature shadows, sharing the screen with the light thrown through Venetian blinds against the walls of his doctor’s office. They’ll open and reveal his facial features, rescuing him from the darkness of psychoanalysis.

The man doesn’t know who he is, what he used to do for a living; he doesn’t even know whether he’s got a wife or not. Payne must have been chosen for his face’s perpetual, knowing blankness—he’s the very picture of lost identity. Payne was struck by a car in 1961, which caused him to have facial reconstruction surgery right out of a noir. He didn’t work again for seven years. The driver was a 21-year-old Bernard Selz, later a hedge-fund manager who advocated for the crackpot theory that vaccinations cause autism (as insane as any of Florey’s occult plot developments) when he wasn’t donating to The Frick Collection.