The whole film uses flashbacks as the basic narrative language, and on this basis, the timeline is completely broken, and the director glues these fragments together again. The story itself has not changed, but it is possible to reproduce the entire complex case from different narrative angles and different narrative times.
The movie begins with Bill following Cobb, making the audience think Bill is the villain of the story. But in the following narrative, Cobb teaches Bill to steal, and Bill, who is completely different after cutting his hair, chats with his mistress in a bar, etc., which further increases the doubts in the audience's heart, prompting the audience to be eager to know the ins and outs of the story step by step. Finally, in the dialogue between the police and Bill, it was discovered that Cobb was the one who really got away with it, and it was the effect that the film got through editing - the truth of the story would never be revealed until the last moment.
Recurring props throughout the film include medical gloves, hammers, and pearl earrings. Medical gloves and a hammer were the last straw that brought Bill to his death. They are symbols of committing crimes. Cobb would wear gloves every time he commits a crime and break into a house with a hammer. Under his teaching, these soon became the symbolic tools of Bill's crime, and Bill gradually became Cobb's scapegoat. In the movie, there is a scene where Bill put on medical gloves before sneaking into the safe and pinned the hammer to his waist, and then the next scene turns to Cobb wearing medical gloves and smashing someone's house with a hammer. , the close connection of these two pictures in different time and space also implies the result that Bill finally became Cobb's scapegoat.
Pearl earrings are a suspicious detail laid by the director. When Bill and Cobb were burglarizing, they hid a pearl earring from the gangster's mistress under the piano stool, but when Bill came to the woman's house after a haircut on a date, the woman told him that the thief only stole one earring. , Bill tried to surprise the woman by finding the earrings under the piano stool without her noticing, but when he opened the stool, he found that the earrings were no longer there. Did the woman know that Cobb put the earrings there but lied to Bill? Or did Cobb quietly take the earrings? Such a doubt is also suggesting to the audience that perhaps Bill is the one who is really kept in the dark.
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