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"Rogue Cop" has one telling flaw: Chris Kelvany's (the corrupt detective) redemptive course has no convincing end point. His estimable alternatives are rather false, dim, and conventional. His younger brother and father as upright cops, his dedicated priest friend, anyone who cozies up to City Hall are hardly persuasive to someone of his arrogance, sophistication, and magnetism. But what makes "Rogue Cop" somewhat moving and low budget effective is that Chris Kelvany (Robert Taylor) follows his guts, assumes command, keeps the case "in the family," and pursues his own version of justice. Also, his resistance to the establishment is unrelenting--from start to finish. In all this, he doesn't abandon his male command, his independence, and his insider mastery of the underworld.

But Sgt. Kelvany cannot save "Rogue Cop," rescue his brother Eddie from a hired gun's bullet, and redeem himself all on his own. Enter two women, Karen and Nancy, ex and current gangster molls. The former is Eddie's hopeful, and the latter the property of Beaumonte (Raft), the rackets boss, who must either silence Eddie or rub him out. Karen and Nancy experience the worst and best of Kelvany and, in the end, take his measure. They wrench him out of his customary swagger, self-satisfaction, and occasional brutishness; and are the only critics who he can't and won't shut out. To boot, they are allies because they oppose the same established power that discard and threaten each one of them.

Karen (Janet Leigh), ex mistress of a Miami mobster, and nightclub singer, can save Eddie by getting him to accept the bribe to cover surgery for her limp. She not only rejects this Kelvany offer, but expresses doubts about loving Eddie. His reply: "Waiting for the butterflies in your stomach, the stars in your eyes." He tells her to "quit the act," and reminds her that she and he are the same kind of dirt. To prove this and use it against her, he glues his kisser to hers. Her retaliation is quick and convincing. And Kelvany will soon admit, first to his brother and then to her, that she's bigger than he is. Only at the most dire moment, does Karen give in to marriage. Later, after the shock of the hit man's bullet, with Kelvany's out to bring down the double-crossing bosses, Karen confronts him one more time: "you go after them because you're pride's hurt." "No more sermons," he says, but pronto he bypasses vengeance for justice.

Nancy (Anne Francis) waiting with Kelvany at the racetrack for her man's arrival, says "here comes my keeper." Then during a more critical meeting at Dan Beaumonte's apt. Involving the Eddie showdown, Kelvany again finds himself alone with Nancy. "Where is everybody?" "Don't I count," she says. And bemoans what she endures. "Tough way to make a living" says Kelvany dryly. She responds "At least I love the guy. What's your excuse?" Touche. Then she says of her boss "Everything is here in the world just so he can use it." She gets up on a coffee table and looks into a mirror: "Lush, lush. I don't feel like a girl anymore.. more like a faucet... turn me on and off." She queries Chris: "how is it you don't get blind drunk like the rest of us?" " I guess I just want to be myself." Or needs to at this point, as the syndicate bosses enter. Nancy greets him with "Danny Boy" in drunken mocking flattery and he knocks her to the ground, immensely embarrassed and intensely irate. Kelvany intervenes. Dan tells Kelvany that the deal is off and points to the exit. Chris counters "You're not talking to a bell hop." He then beats the hell out of his goon. Then Nancy cheers, taunting Danny "Did the big man put you back in the gutter." Danny orders that Nancy be taken to Fonso to have her face re-arranged. Later Nancy, after leaking valuable mob secrets to Kelvaney will join his brother as a victim of gangster violence.

Not to be conspiratorial, but the finale ambulance scene seems to use a stand-in for Kelvany's crowning moment: "You're a better cop than I could ever be," the back-up says to the partner. And then the ultimate: "Forgive me." What I'm assuming is that Robert Taylor himself refused to participate in this simpering ending, and would have preferred death in a hail of bullets in the scene previous. Yeah, I think the movie goes rogue on rogue. Give us the Kelvany who when the priest offers Eddie's 6th pall-bearer position for him, is met with "Get somebody else."

Turning to watch "Witness to Murder," is similar to turning to an old picture album. It draws you in via the photographic. That initial/primary city residential neighborhood, shot from various windows or roofs, seems to belong to reverie--fleeting, ordinary, as private as the night. The wind, the rain, the angular views, the dead of night, the rattle sounds of the awning create an aura. Nothing in this spot hints of murder, and yet a restless woman goes to her window, and observes exactly that in an across-the-street apt building's window. The police arrive and shuttle around the two apts on the deserted/solitary boulevards below. Indoor and outdoor scenes are such matches that we want to hold off the police's premature departure--and the dawn itself.

But the spell of this quiet cinematic experience is hardly broken as three lead actors, the witness, the detective, and the murderer, all independent urban types, interact in the same basic settings of these apt buildings, the police station, and occasional other related venues. It helps that this is a an intelligent, direct, and simple murder mystery--so easy to absorb. It also helps that, although the plot, does make a few unnatural demands on the roles, all three actors hold their own and make for satisfying characters.

Barbara Stanwyck as Cheryl Draper, the window witness, despite the plot blocks, is the most consistent. She appears in all the settings, and seems to carry some of the original night time atmosphere to each. Cheryl is a fashion designer, and a part-time painter. The detective assigned to her case, for the most part, doesn't believe her story because she's a career woman, single, not particularly lovable, and perhaps too demanding. Flipped off by his insistence that what she saw was a only a dream, and by the murderer's threats and traps, she's doubly imperiled. But she runs her own life, and although her conviction wavers under coercive tactics, of both the murderer and detective, she never folds.

Larry Mathews (Gary Merrill), the detective who takes evening courses for a law degree, is low key, amenable--and he somehow fits the reverie of the early scenes. He's a rather unproblematic bachelor, who is half smitten with Cheryl because she's a reasonably good catch for him. He has a certain rapport with her, is receptive to her challenges, to her feistiness and even to her open defiance. But he's not without a streak or two of resentment and can offer her droll advice. Plus he's a man of the book and the law so he's never fully convinced of her testimony no matter how much evidence she springs at him. As a character, he may be the most plot-twisted of the three.

Albert Richter (George Sanders) is the murderer who fatally strangles his underclass mistress in his luxury apt across the way. In a sense, he adds mystery to the original eerie night tableau. As an incarnation of National Socialism, he writes obscure books on the world economy, and is perhaps bankrolled by some international Nazi Network. He murdered to clear the way for marriage to an elite heiress, or to status, money, class, and influence. He's sophisticated, urbane, cunning, calculating, and so superior. He not only sets traps, plants evidence for "Miss Draper," and creates a wedge between her and Larry, but has her committed to a mental institute. But it's he himself who is mad, with power, with missionary fervor, and with blood passion. His hollow oration in German is pure Nazi Speak, and part of an admission to his bedeviling neighbor of his guilt, betrayals, lies, and cruelty which, two attempts on her life later and atop a naked high rise shrouded in darkness, boomerang.

Because I can sidestep "A Walk Among the Tombstone's" extremes, I can recommend it to myself but not to friends. But Liam Neeson is the perfect actor for Matt Scudder and his Brooklyn location/atmosphere. Despite the horrific, the sadistic, his own inadvertent killing of a young girl in the shootout that ended his cop's job, and other quirks and distractions, Neeson holds firm to his character in every one of his variant scenes--and visual settings, all of which seem to provide moorings for his unusual and convincing life. How many 1999 private eyes work without a cell phone, a camera, connectivity or work alone with bladder-busting stoicism? How many don't have a wife, a child, or even a love interest? What's striking about Neeson's (Scudder doesn't fit) detective is his human-ness, low key humor, naturalness, and his moral certainty. Withered and haunted by his terrible memory, he bears a background depression, as if living partly in the underworld of grave stones, and a weariness that his active AA membership cannot touch. Yet his street wits and policing experience are always intact, and his directness never falters. Owning his role up to the bitter end, his exhausted, rather miserable gray face, fills and graces the screen in "A Walk's" final image.

But the other side of "A Walk"--as evident as it is separate, is its cutthroat misogyny. It opens with shots of a sexual torture of a bound kidnapped woman, her mouth duct taped, and a tear trickling down her cheek. You know the rest: psychic and bodily afflictions: a breast lopped off with a piano wire, hacksaws, scalpels, cleavers, ropes, handcuffs, and bodies chopped up and disposed of in novel ways. Instead of decapitating their targeted drug dealers, the creepy assailants literally decapitate the partners and daughters of said, while ripping off the ransom money. It's all cloaked, of course, in modern crime genre, but it's really trumpeting murder/sex. If this can drive the male cemetery grounds-keeper, who witnessed the torture, to suicide, how does it not impact at least female viewers? That the despicable accomplices are assumed gay only compounds the movie's stark splits.

There are lesser debits as in some sketchy characters; the projected titles of the 12 AA promises during the final action scenes; and other TV movie type commentaries on things like gun safety, and Sickle Cell Anemia. But it's really Liam Neeson in one corner, as private-eye, unflinchingly confronting a redemptive crisis, and the ripper murderers unflinchingly engaging in pointed cruelty-- "touch the breast you want to keep," in the other, that are the major considerations of "A Walk Among the Tombstones."