"No Way Out" is a picture inciting to violence. Like "Home of the Brave," it relies partly on the shock-effect of anti-Negro dialogue ("dangerous" anti-white terns have been deleted in Boston and elsewhere). But where "Home of the Brave" and other movies dealt with discrimination and persecution, and found them to have personal solutions, "No Way Out" deals with group conflict and war. For members of opposing armies--Niggertown and the white slum of Beaver Canal--there are no individual solutions.

Director Joseph Mankiewicz has condensed the action to a series of intense, violent impression. Some are almost surrcalistic, such as a scene in a Beaver Canal junkyard, where white hoodlums test their weapons before a battle. Personalities and personal situations are only suggested; characters become casts of mass emotions.

Richard Widmark is frightening as Ray Biddle, a hood who conjures up a race riot. As an individual or a type, Biddle would seem psychopathic; instead, his role in the film is a symbolic, gathering behind one grinning mask all the virulence of Beaver Canal. In the only role of individuality, Linda Darnell is a slattern trying to escape from her slum background, who betrays and then rescues the Negro doctor (Stephen Poitier) accused of murdering Biddle's brother.

After a race riot, in which colored gangs jump the gun and attack the whites on their own ground, an autopsy proves the doctor innocent. Biddle is unconvinced. This stalemate is the point, and the logical climax, of the film. As the action continues, with Biddle's vendetta against the doctor, the characters resolve into more familiar type-patterns: the man who hates Negroes because he himself was involved, the doctor who must treat the man he hates. But the ending is still inconclusive. The doctor has won his life, others have died, but nothing has been changed.

"No Way Out" is important because it works with some facts that other pictures have preferred to ignore. One is that Negroes, like whites, may react to persecution with lead pipes instead of neuroses. Another is that race riots have their own logic, that discrimination is not merely a habit of thought or a result of faulty reasoning. Finally, men fighting for life cannot be exhorted or "educated" to a peaceful adjustment. "Ain't it a lot," says the leader of the colored gang, "asking us to be better than they are, when we get killed trying to be as good?"

This is a picture without preaching, without answers, without hope. Struggling alone to find a way out off the past and what the past has made of him, character after character ends where he started. It may be that they are distorted and static, robots who can only late themselves and hurt each other. What is terrifying is that they look so much like people.