Manny Farber was probably the only American critic to hail this low budget film noir as one of the best films of the year in his round-up for The Nation in 1948. At the time of our Alton Retrospective in 1975, Errol Morris noted of He Walked By Night:

“Truly exceptional! An all-male cast. Richard Basehart plays the psychotic killer mercilessly tracked down by police detectives. Taken (or so the studio claims) from actual police files, the film opens with the brutal murder of a policeman. Location shooting, in the relentlessly realistic tradition of T-Men and Canon City, is highlighted by the final shoot-out in the LA drainage tunnel system (featured later in Them). A gritty masterpiece!”