Superior lighting is the first thing one notices about 'He Walked by Night'. John Alton was an enormously talented cameraman with lighting theories that made complicated setups look simple. At home in dramatic Technicolor, he excelled in noir lighting that never looks forced or by the book. Venetian blinds are a noir given, but it's safe to say that nobody used Venetian blinds like John Alton used Venetian blinds. He makes bland exteriors and post office interiors look interesting without gimmicks. An interrogation scene with some young punks has just the right mix of dawn's light peeking in through the window. He surrounds Richard Basehart with cold, deterministic pools of light and darkness. And the subterranean finish is a hellish limbo-world. [Glenn Erickson on the DVD Savant website]

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The film is largely done in an expressionist style that regularly evokes Fritz Lang. John Alton's brilliant geometric cinematography uses square and rectangle sets, but turns them diagonal through his angular camera placement. Alton uses deep focus photography, but our attention is somewhat directed because circular objects offset the square architecture. Continuing his experiments with high contrast black and white, floods of light are often all that illuminates the extremely dark screen. In most cases, the foreground is dark with the light residing in the outer edges of the frame to create an effect that's arguably as close as a two dimensional film can come to looking three dimensional. [Mike Lorefice, 2007]