Crime Wave calls to mind another film devoted to the organized response of a city: John McTiernan's masterpiece Die Hard: With a Vengeance. The various interlocking gears and responses of a city rendered as brisk montage, clean pans emphasizing movement along networks, cause and effect as formal drive. McTiernan's film expands both the formal and thematic scope, but Crime Wave is an thrilling and often beautifully efficient film. De Toth by and large strips this noir of some of the genre's more garish affectations, instead aiming for a process-oriented study of law enforcement. The lives of individuals, in this case a gone-straight ex-con and his wife, are by and large at the whims of a larger force (again calling to mind McTiernan). In de Toth's film, salvation comes by individual intervention on the part of one force (in this case being Sterling Hayden's detective), where as in McTiernan's film the city as a whole, once finally roused, works towards a common goal.
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