critics, though it was especially unpopular with American reviewers. In 1964, Bosley Crowther of the New York Times wrote that "…there's not much to recommend the picture, which is one of those feeble attempts to be philosophical and mordant about crime as a chosen career… Endless English subtitles translate the slangy dialogue". But the film defined the Melville outlook; a lonely, paranoid masculinity where nothing pays off.
