He Walked by Night (1949) on Netflix
Detectives Marty Brennan and Chuck Jones hunt the man who shot a Los Angeles patrolman. Roy Morgan, a burglar, stays ahead of them by listening to police radio calls.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.0/107,620 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes82%
Trailer
Plot summary
Patrolman Rob Rawlins stops a man he takes for a burglar on a Los Angeles street and is shot. The small clues lead nowhere, so detectives Marty Brennan and Chuck Jones take on the hunt for a killer with no criminal record. The man is Roy Morgan, who has hidden himself in a Hollywood bungalow with a radio he built and a small dog, listening to police calls to stay out of their way. He sells stolen electronic equipment through the fence Paul Reeves. When Reeves is threatened with prosecution, he agrees to help the police, and Brennan and Jones set a watch on his office.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about He Walked by Night (1949)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- While making the film, actor Jack Webb met its police technical advisor Marty Wynn, and a conversation with Wynn led Webb to create the radio program Dragnet, which later became the first modern police television drama.
- The film is loosely based on the real-life Erwin "Machine-Gun" Walker, a former Glendale, California police department employee and World War II veteran whose spree of burglaries, robberies and shootings hit the Los Angeles area between 1945 and 1946.
