This film beautifully points up the great difficulty there is in justly evaluating films in peripheral categories which have rather different values and value from mainstream films. All reviewers are unanimous that it is an excellent film and I am not going to disagree with the, It is a first-rate film in a fourth-rate category - the lowly "low budget" "B" film. It is not quite in the class of a film like Ullmer's Detour, which is a masterpiece, but it does magnificently capture the sleazy atmosphere of the equally fourth-rate carnival it portrays. Forget the purely nominal film noir plot. It is really about this grubby and grotesque but actually surprisingly charming little world to which a "straight" man and a "straight" girl on the run have to adapt themselves and come after a fashion to appreciate its values and its value. Like the nominal plot, they are the nomivnal stars. The real performances come fom Chares Olander as the hard-bitten, blackmailing, lecherous - but actually fundamentally decent - dwarf who runs the carnival, Frank Albertson as the baker and Edith Petit splendid as Lil in charge of the dancing girls, themselves only a knife-edge away away from a life of prostitution. The writing is tense and clever and the cinematography by the unknown Victor Lukens is superb. Don't bother to look out for Steve McQueen. If you blink you'll miss him. I must have blinked.
The French phrase in the title means "down there if you find me" (when one wants to get rid of someone, in slightly old-fashioned but delicious slang, one tells them to go and look somewhere else to see if one is there). It was also the title of a long-running radio programme, the last to defend committed investigative journalism in the interested of the underprivileged - those "down tere". And it is precisely that empathy with the world "down there" (see if am not there) that is the great quality of this film. Standing up nobly for the fourth-rate!
