Crime Wave

Steve Lacey is trying to put his prison past behind him and settle into ordinary married life. That changes when an old cellmate, wounded during an armed robbery, turns up at his home looking for a place to hide. Two other former inmates soon follow, and they pressure Steve into driving them in a bank robbery, while a police detective named Sims keeps him under watch, convinced he has not really gone straight.

The film was directed by André de Toth and written by Crane Wilbur, with Bryan Foy producing for Warner Bros. It came out in 1953, the same year as de Toth's House of Wax and the fourth of the six features listed in his directing career, which had begun with The Five-Forty in 1939 and continued through Ramrod and on to The Indian Fighter and The Mongols. Sterling Hayden plays Detective Sims, Gene Nelson and Phyllis Kirk play Steve and Ellen Lacey, and Ted de Corsia and Charles Bronson appear among the fugitives, in a credited cast of forty-six. Running just seventy-three minutes, it is a compact crime thriller.

On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.3 from about 5,300 votes, and on TMDB 7.1 from a much smaller number of votes, suggesting a well-regarded genre entry with a modest but appreciative audience. A critics' rating of 6.4 from eleven reviews sits below both audience scores.