“(…) It is in his complex use of colour and symbolism that Ray reveals himself at his most inspired, perhaps most notably in the way he achieves meaning and emotional effect through the hues of Vicki’s clothes. When she first meets Farrell at the party Rico pays her to attend, she wears a scarlet dress so evocative of her way of life that the lawyer immediately feels justified in commenting on her venality. At the end of the evening, however, this apparently hackneyed visual shortland is given further depth by a dissolve that follows the red of her flatmate’s blood in the bath with the same red dress, worn by a severely shaken Vicki at the hospital: red has now come to signify not only sexuality, but danger and death. Only returns to wearing red when, in an attempt to seduce him into turning state’s witness, she visits him in the hotel room booked by Stewart. As a direct result of the tryst, she is abducted by Rico, who in order to persuade Farrell to retract his testimony again, takes a bottle of acid from a white bag and pours it on to a red paper Christmas decoration, before bringing Vicki into the room, still in the red gown, with her face wrapped in white bandages.Without actually showing any violence against Vicki, Ray reveals – by associating her appearance with that of the paper bell, and through our memory of her flatmate’s death – the vicious nature of the violence that threatens her”.

Geoff Brown, The Films of Nicholas Ray. The Poet of Nightfall, BFI, London, 2004, pp. 133-134