The first thing that attracted me to this image was the obvious low-key lighting, which is pretty much a necessity for the film noir style. It's very dark and sort of "gritty" feeling, because you can't really see what's going on in this image at all. Still, Walter is the dominant, because he's the only part that you can even partially see, thanks to his side being slightly lit up. We can't see his face, so by all rights, just looking at the image supposedly shouldn't give us any idea as to what he's thinking. But...we can see his walk. Hands in his pockets, his walks seems more uneasy than carefree (although this is helped by the fact that right before this particular shot, we could see his face, which certainly looked uneasy, and he is narrating this by saying that "it was the walk of a dead man.").
Once he turns away from the camera and starts walking away, it's clear that his paranoia, his fear that everything is going to fall apart, will come true. He is being watched. He is alone on the street, as we can tell, but the camera is watching him. He is not off scot-free. The camera does not follow after him, of course, it just stays still and observes. The camera judges - we judge.
Other people have already pointed this out, and it's not something I would have noticed on my own, but I like the idea that the significance of him being only half-lit is that he's being taken over by the darkness...by the femme fatale (another staple of film noir, of course). He's being taken over just like the guy in Sunrise - his evil mistress was also bathed in darkness, which affected him as well.
Good stuff, Jen. I particularly like what you have to say about the judgment of the camera and the spectator, as well as about the seeming determinism of the shot. All that delicious darkness that he's headed for.
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