Pushover

Pushover (1954) is a sharp Hollywood noir you can watch online on iFILM. Directed by Richard Quine, this 88-minute crime thriller pairs Fred MacMurray with a then-unknown Kim Novak in a story built entirely around one bad decision.

Detective Paul Sheridan is assigned to shadow the girlfriend of a bank robber. Surveillance work, nothing more. Then he meets Lorna. She's perceptive and dangerous, and Sheridan knows it — and stays anyway. What follows is less a crime plot than a slow-motion self-destruction: a cop who sees every step of the trap and walks into it with open eyes.

MacMurray had already played the doomed fool in Double Indemnity a decade earlier, and Quine uses that shadow deliberately. Novak, in her film debut, holds her own against him. She would be in Hitchcock's Vertigo three years later — but this is where she began. Stream Pushover (1954) online on iFILM.