OVER-EXPOSED (1956)

I haven’t written much about Cleo Moore or Hugo Haas aside from an earlier essay on The Other Woman, in spite of seeing the lion’s share of their respective pictures. I’ve always intended to do some sort of magazine length piece about the director and his peroxide muse, but the moment never seems right. However I had a chance to take a look at Moore’s 1956 film Over-Exposed on the Bad Girls of Film Noir, Volume 2 disc, released by Columbia Classics in 2010. My initial viewing was via a rough bootleg, so the high quality transfer here was a welcome surprise.

This is the rare Cleo Moore outing minus Hugo Haas, and it’s refreshing to see the actress with her name above the title and out from under the big Czech’s pervasive lack of self esteem and his bittered pleas for Hollywood recognition. On the other hand, worn-out Lewis Seiler, who directed Moore the previous year in Women’s Prison (on the same disc as Over-Exposed), is asleep at the wheel. Nobody out there is shouting that this would-be Monroe was a great actress, but surely she wasn’t hopeless — see her sexy splash scene opposite Robert Ryan in Nick Ray’s On Dangerous Ground. Throughout Over-Exposed Moore appears to have only just learned her lines, just a take or two away from getting it right, but Seiler is either too easily satisfied or simply too anxious to get the movie in the can. It makes for a frustrating viewing experience. 

The story here takes a backseat to cheesecake, with many of the scenes contrived to get Moore into a series of cantilevered gowns and swimsuits by legendary Columbia costumer Jean Louis (picture Rita/Gilda singing Put the Blame on Mame). And although the 5' 3" canary blonde was at best a poor man’s bombshell, Moore never looked better than she does in Over-Exposed, and if Marilyn or Lana saw the move there must have been a few moments when even their eyebrows perked up. Spectacular cleavage aside, Moore plays Lily Krenshka, a small town girl who arrives in the Big Apple only to get busted after she landing a job as a hostess in a clip-joint. Lily’s perp walk is flashpopped by Max West, an aging, drunken photographer who somehow manages to convince her to pose for swimsuit photos in his apartment studio. Intrigued by the possibilities of a life on the other side of the camera, Lily stays on with West, tending to his alcoholism and reviving his flagging business, all while learning the ins and outs of the photographer’s life (via a nice montage). Eventually she leaves the nest with a camera of her own and a sexier name — Lila Crane, but finds career opportunities few and far between. Spurned by the legitimate news agencies, she finally lands a position as a barely-clad picture grabber at a Manhattan nightspot. Before long Lila shrewdly develops herself into one of the top portrait and advertising photogs in the city, but will her reckless ambition and her casual willingness to photograph anyone, at any time, doing anything, bring it all crashing down?

Although Over-Exposed is ostensibly a crime film, it’s a stretch to call it a film noir. There’s no doom, dread, or angst, and with the exception of a scene near the end involving pock-marked love interest Richard Crenna, there’s little in the way of visual style. Most of the scenes are flooded with light, giving viewers a never-ending eyeful of a decked-out Moore, in spite of otherwise cheap production values. In trading Haas for Seiler we get to finally see what Moore could do in an unabashed star vehicle, but at the expense of Haas’s weird, and inherently noirish psychological peccadilloes. 

Over-Exposed exploits its star under the façade of a morally upright tale about runaway ambition, but such irony was obvious even in 1956. In the end contemporary viewers will find a film that merely reinforces those same old gendered mid-century stereotypes about “threatening” women who want to work in a man’s world. Faced with desperate circumstances after being arrested as a hostess (prostitute), Moore’s Lily/Lila admirably manages to lift herself out of a deplorable situation through a legitimate professional career. And although the script paints her as a careerist who eschews morality and a place in the kitchen for money and glamour, contemporary audiences will find little fault with her actions. After all, is it fair that Lila lives in a world where the quality of her photographs seems not to matter?

Over-Exposed (1956)

Directed by Lewis Seiler

Produced by Lewis J. Rachmil

Screenplay by James Gunn and Gil Orlovitz

Story by Richard Sale and Mary Loos

Cinematography by Henry Freulich

Starring Cleo Moore and Richard Crenna

Released by Columbia Pictures

Running time: 80 minutes

THE COME ON (1956)

“A woman like you needs a good beating at least once a week.”

Park Avenue, the best schools, a rich family — Anne Baxter came up easy. Her grandfather was Frank Lloyd Wright, for pete’s sake. He built her a theater at age three, and by ten she knew she’d be an actress. She was on Broadway at thirteen, studying with Maria Ouspenskaya. Baxter soon looked west, and breezed into the movie business with the same sense of ease that she had always known. She lost the role of Maxim’s young wife in Rebecca to Joan Fontaine (Hitch thought her too young), but Daryl Zanuck was nevertheless tickled to sign her at Fox, where she enjoyed featured player status until breaking through in Welles’s 1942 The Magnificent Ambersons. She really scored in 1946, winning an Oscar supporting Tyrone Power and Gene Tierney in The Razor’s Edge. That same year she got hitched to block-of-wood noir-guy John Hodiak, and began trying in vain to balance marriage and work. When she landed the to-die-for role of Eve Harrington in the 1950 juggernaut All About Eve, she was as close to the top of the Hollywood heap as she’d ever get. But rather than building her star power with another plum part, she decided to get pregnant. 

Baxter took some time off to give birth, and made only one picture in 1951, playing the Hawk’s wife in Follow the Sun — hardly the appropriate follow-up to a mega-hit with fourteen Academy Award nominations. Upon her return it seemed that audiences had moved on, infatuated with Lana, Liz, and Deborah. Baxter couldn’t vamp it up with the younger, more sexualized honeys like Carroll or Marilyn either, dolls who could mug for the camera in a way that the refined, brainy actress just didn’t seem to have in her. But she was tenacious about working, and by the time she starred in Fritz Lang’s 1953 film The Blue Gardenia, she and Hodiak were quits. Anne kept her Oscar and daughter Katrina; Hodiak moved in with his parents, went back to work himself, then kicked the bucket — dead of a heart attack at 41. 

Baxter soldiered on, a divorced mother on the bad side of thirty. She kept plugging, but was obligated to make-do in the occasional B picture between better parts. (Just like Edward G. Robinson (who had his own troubles) Baxter eventually got a DeMille–sized boost via 1956’s The Ten Commandments.) Which brings us to The Come On, a movie with a good cast but standard (meaning completely sub-standard) Allied Artists production values. Yet unlike so much of Poverty Row’s typical fodder, The Come On had an ace up its sleeve: a great cast put together by producer Lindsley Parsons, who knew how to do a lot with a little, and proved it in a string of cheap but good noir pictures, including Cry Vengeance (1954), Loophole (1954), Finger Man (1955), and Portland Exposé (1957). The Come On sports two bona fide movie stars: femme fatale Baxter and fan favorite Sterling Hayden. The movie ties them up romantically, but suffers a little for their lack of chemistry — yet that’s the thing about quality professional actors: even without romantic fireworks they can still make almost any film interesting. It’s too bad Hayden doesn’t get one of the movie’s cop parts — he just never seems quite as interested when he doesn’t have a badge on. That being said, I’d still queue up just to see the guy standing around smoking. 

I won’t waste time trying to relate much of what happens in The Come On, because this is the sort of plot-driven movie where 'what happens' is all that matters anyway. Besides, the story is absurdly complex — serpentine, silly, and stuffed with the sort of happenstance and circumstance that’s only palatable in Poverty Row pictures. However I’ll give The Come On, and its veritable team of writers, this much credit: it has a million twists, even one or two you might not see coming. Here’s the setup in a nutshell though: Rita Kendrick (Baxter) is sunbathing on a deserted beach somewhere south of the border when she catches fisherman Dave Arnold (Hayden) giving her the once over. She tries to play it cool, but is thwarted by the wind and a beach towel that just won’t lie down. Cue the big fella, who helps with the towel then steals a kiss. Sparks fly, and before long the two are sharing a smoke and making plans for a late-night rendezvous on Dave’s trawler, Lucky Lady. Coy and mysterious, wearing a painted-on white dress straight from Lana Turner’s closet, Rita shows up, but turns skittish and flees Dave’s boat as soon as he tries to get physical. Later he sees her at the bar and gets wise — she’s sitting with two men, one of whom is her husband Harley (John Hoyt), much older and all kinds of drunk and disorderly. Dave saunters over to introduce himself, assuming Harley is Rita's father, which peeves the old guy and somehow earns Rita a whiskey-spiked smack across the face. Dave then lays him out, leaving the third man to clean up the mess. Later that night, Rita returns to Lucky Lady with a confession on her lips. Harley isn’t really her husband — nor is that even his real name — he’s her partner in a blackmail grift they’ve been working for the past three years, using her “come on” to bilk rich geeks out of their dough. The schmuck at the table was their latest patsy. But now that she’s met Dave, she knows what real love feels like and wants to break free from the scheme. She wants a picket fence life back in the states — and maybe she and Dave could have it if only Harley didn’t have his hooks dug in so deep, if only she could get at her share of the grift money, if only there were some way to get her “husband” out of the picture… 

The Come On is obviously a B movie, warts and all, but the performers and the filmmakers put forth an undeniably sincere effort. Its shoddy production values and pedestrian photography are made up for by its story — complicated but coherent — and even more by its cast. Career TV man John Hoyt practically steals the show as Baxter’s lowlife partner; while Jesse White — known to generations of Americans as the Maytag repairman — is a spectacularly oily private eye. Admittedly, no one could possibly argue that Hayden is at his best, but Baxter gives it everything she’s got. Sometimes a performer’s personal circumstances equip them to play a role so well that an otherwise inconsequential film becomes special — a raging Edward G. Robinson in Black Tuesday comes to mind — in her own way Anne Baxter is that good in The Come On. (The great BmacV even calls her a “trouper.”) In spite of her upbringing, it’s plain to see how Baxter’s later misfortunes had changed her. Gone now is what Zanuck called the “bitch virtuosity” that had made the pampered star into the perfect Eve. The woman on display in The Come On is wary, vulnerable, desperate, tired, and to tell the truth, trying just a little too hard. In other words, she’s perfect. In the years since All About Eve, Anne Baxter had seen her marriage fail and her ex-husband die. She struggled mightily to maintain her status in Hollywood, all while trying to raise a daughter that too often she left in the care of others, and wading through an endless but excruciatingly shallow pool of male suitors, praying that one might make a suitable father. She was lonely, wracked by guilt, caught up in a life that bore little resemblance to the one she had enjoyed in the forties. She was perfectly equipped to play Rita — a beautiful woman standing at a crossroads, neck-deep in trouble and unable to move, needing someone to help her make the right choice and get her life once again moving forward. 

The Come On (1956)

Directed by Russell Birdwell

Produced by Lindsley Parsons and John Burrows

Written by Whitman Chambers, based on his own novel

Cinematography by Ernest Haller

Starring Anne Baxter, Sterling Hayden, and John Hoyt

Released by Allied Artists

Running time: 83 minutes. 

TIME TABLE (1956)

For the men of film noir, the ones who fought the war and returned to a changing country, the idea of a dutiful and submissive wife, a white collar, and a white picket fence just couldn’t cut it — and heaven knows our noir heroes tried to fit back in. They squirm in their suits, tugging at those tight collars, chewing their nails, always on the make for that thing that might break the monotony and remind them of what it feels like to be alive. Pour another drink, Don Draper. 

Despite a five-decade career in film and television, Mark Stevens was most visible in the years immediately after the war. He made his first big splash with Lucille Ball and Bill Bendix in 1946’s The Dark Corner, followed by a pair of notable 1948 films: the FBI-noir The Street with No Name and the Academy heavyweight The Snake Pit. Stevens is of less interest for those projects (to me, at least) than he is for his 1950s work, after he struck out on his own. He was the force behind his own film production and music publishing companies (he could sing), as well as the star and occasional director of Big Town, a popular weekly television series in which he played a crime-busting newsman. Although Stevens failed to carve out a lasting place as filmmaker, his earliest efforts, Cry Vengeance (1954) and Time Table (1956) — both surprisingly good noirs — beg for increased attention in contemporary film circles and make one wish the fledgling director had framed more crime movies. 

Unfortunately for anyone who hasn’t seen Time Table, it’s impossible to discuss without spoiling its big twist — so let’s get it out of the way right now (and don’t worry, the reveal occurs in the first half of the film):  Stevens plays an insurance investigator who — here it comes — turns out to be the brains behind the very robbery he’s asked to solve. Although it’s an old saw that may bring to mind Double Indemnity, Time Table more closely resembles titles like Roadblock, Private Hell 36, and The Man Who Cheated Himself.  It draws from a myriad of noir films rather than any one in particular. This much is certain: in spite of being a cinematic mutt, Time Table is an intriguing movie that deserves to be seen. However, if your taste prohibits enjoyment of a “derivative” film, then it probably isn’t for you. On the other hand, if you are able to connect with a noir picture that utilizes familiar genre tropes and still manages to captivate, keep reading. Or better yet, go track this down. It will surprise you. 

The movie opens with a ten-minute-long heist sequence, cleverly staged on a train speeding west through the Arizona night. A polished crook posing as a doctor manages to crack the train’s safe and snatch all the money inside. The job is perfectly planned and calmly executed, using high-tech explosives, a precisely detailed timetable, and a cagey scheme involving a “sick” passenger and his “wife” — both in on the caper. The trio of bandits exit the train in a scrubby desert town, and abscond in an ambulance with half a million dollars. The railroad’s insurers will have to make good on the policy unless the money is recovered, so they assign the case to Charlie Norman (Stevens), their best man, forcing him and his wife Ruth (Marianne Stewart) to delay their long-planned Mexican vacation. Charlie is partnered with railroad detective and best friend (yeah, yeah) Joe Armstrong (King Calder). 

The second act contains a healthy dose of cop procedure. Charlie and Joe chase leads, pal around with the yokel cops, and generally marvel at the skill of their quarry — all while Charlie becomes more preoccupied and nervous. We’re convinced his frustration owes to the lost vacation, until the twist occurs and we discover otherwise: Charlie masterminded the entire robbery in the first place, and he’s torn up because his perfect crime is unraveling all around him. He dreamt up the caper, recruited the players, and worked out the all-important timetable. Why? For some unknown reason Charlie is fed up — with his job, with his home, and with his marriage. He intended to pull off the heist, then use his Mexican holiday as a means to skip out on his old life and rendezvous with his accomplices south of the border. There he intends to cut up the money and start fresh in Argentina with new squeeze Linda (Felicia Farr). Yet fate, as it so often does in film noir, has a different agenda: one of the crew is shot and killed, throwing off the timetable and forcing everyone to hole up. In the meantime, Joe’s investigation starts to pay off, while Charlie grows more desperate. He is finally forced to commit a murder in order to protect himself, scaring his remaining co-conspirators into making a run for it. Just as Joe finally gets wise to the whole scheme, Charlie heads for Tijuana in a last-ditch effort to find Linda. With the Federales riding shotgun, Joe corners the lovers in TJ and guns are drawn… 

Whether explored deeply or viewed as pure escapism, Time Table scores. Aben Kandel’s (City for Conquest) accomplished script surpasses typical B movie fare, with an airtight plot and plenty of tough, pithy dialog. Kandel also has a gift for subtle double-entendres that reinforce the story’s central theme and reward attentive viewers. For example, early on when Ruth replaces the blanket on a dozing Charlie, he mumbles, “What’re you trying to do, smother me?” All of Kandel’s characters, in one way or another and regardless of their gender, are struggling to overcome the emptiness of a world in which they’ve discovered, all too late, that the fairy tale assurances of their younger years are simply not meant to be. Charlie finds no comfort in his bleak, middle class existence. Fulfilling the role of the perfect wife brings Ruth little but disappointment. Linda trades her alcoholic, disgraced husband for the promise of a better life with Charlie, but instead leaps from the frying pan into an altogether deadlier fire. Even Joe runs himself into the ground living up to the image of a dead cop father who taught him there’s no such thing as a perfect crime. In Time Table, perfection is as ethereal as the haze of cigarette smoke that obscures each frame. 

Stevens’ direction might be described as workmanlike, but he understands where to linger, when to move quickly, and how to get a lot out of his actors — Time Table has a great cast. Wesley Addy (Kiss Me Deadly, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?) is fantastic as the drunken ex-M.D. who holds it together just long enough to rob the train, while King Calder, who worked previously with Stevens during his run as television’s private detective Martin Kane, excels as the relentless railroad cop. Calder’s face and body language are so hang-dog it’s hard to imagine him in roles outside of the crime genre. Two of the most memorable performances come from actors in small parts. Jack Klugman, appearing in his first film role after having met Stevens on an episode of Big Town, plays a chain-smoking wheelman who squirms under the lights like nobody’s business. Klugman has just one scene, but he steals it cleanly away from Stevens and Calder. The second standout is Alan Reed, whose name and face may not be incredibly familiar, though his unforgettable and iconic voice certainly is — even thirty-five years after his death. Reed’s stocky build, unique look, and instant pathos made him a natural for this stuff — it’s surprising he didn’t make more crime pictures. Reed vividly brings to life the helicopter pilot most responsible for Charlie’s plans going down the tube. He burns the candle from both ends and pays a steep price for turning stool pigeon — in one of the film’s best moments. 

At a quick 79 minutes, Time Table is a second feature — it plows ahead, sacrificing much at the altar of brevity. Yet while similar films are repudiated as rote exercises in “what happened next?” moviemaking, they frequently provide an instructive lens through which we can examine the cultural values of their era. Time Table is such a film. At its core is the question of Charlie’s motivation to self-destruct, and he offers no clues beyond a vaguely expressed desire for a change. At a critical point in the final reel, Ruth confronts him: 

     “Charlie, why’d you do it? Why?” 

     “Why? What does it matter?”

And later in the same scene:

     “We had so much Charlie. Why, why?” 

     “The house becomes a prison, the job a trap.” 

     “What did you want?”

     “A new kind of life.”

Yet the film doesn’t explain why Charlie so desperately wants this new life. Personally and professionally he has everything a man could reasonably ask for — his situation is even admirable. Ruth is a kind and attractive woman for whom he has genuine affection, and his tough-guy job as an insurance cop makes him a bona fide man’s man. The most telling aspect of Time Table is how it takes for granted that viewers will embrace Charlie’s compulsion to escape his circumstances without being given a reason. 

Look closely at the absurdity of Charlie’s actions: he trades his job and his honor for a satchel of money; a fine suburban home for assuredly more squalid digs in Argentina; and a caring spouse another woman, albeit younger and a little prettier, who nevertheless seems to be cut from the same beige piece of cloth as his wife. It’s also worth pointing out that Linda is a Mexican — another way in which the film drives home the point that Charlie’s all-American situation somehow isn’t adequate. And he knows his trades are for keeps — permanently sanctified through blood and betrayal. After all, Charlie’s a law enforcement man who, like Walter Neff, understands the risks but believes his knowledge of the game provides an edge. At the same time, he is aware of the looming possibility of the little green room at Quentin, where one’s final black moments are strained listening for the plop-plop-fizz-fizz of everlasting relief.

Unlike in other noir pictures, the protagonist’s downfall can’t be attributed to a femme fatale. Time Table doesn’t have one. Sure, there’s a girl, but Charlie’s inamorata is hardly an upgrade on his wife. Here’s a guy who is winning the rat race and still wants out — he hates everything about his situation. The answer to his motivation lies in the movie’s unrelenting cynicism. Time Table consciously subverts the post-war American dream of happiness through national prosperity and material achievement. It thumbs its nose at the white bread promises of the Eisenhower era: the steady jobs, home-sweet-homes, and June Allyson wives that saturated mainstream media offerings. It gives us a protagonist who has achieved these material things and more, yet remains unfulfilled. In many ways, Charlie’s case is even more compelling than that of the pill-popping Ed Avery in another 1956 film, Nicholas Ray’s brilliant Bigger Than Life — if only because Time Table is neither a character study nor a message picture. For the men of film noir, the ones who fought the war and returned to a changing country, the idea of a dutiful and submissive wife, a white collar, and a white picket fence just couldn’t cut it — and heaven knows our noir heroes tried to fit back in. They squirm in their suits, tugging at those tight collars, chewing their nails, always on the make for that thing that might break the monotony and remind them of what it feels like to be alive. Pour another drink, Don Draper. 

What makes Time Table so enthralling (as well as numerous other film noirs), is that while modern audiences might find Charlie Norman’s gambit unfathomable or absurd, some of the 1956 crowd undoubtedly recognized themselves in him — feeling every bit as suffocated while having to acquiesce to the vanilla model of happiness offered up on countless roadside billboards, magazine advertisements, and sponsor-centric TV programs. Consequently, Charlie becomes a poster child for those who felt trapped in that uncanny era of prosperous conformity — and an authentic film noir anti-hero. In recognizing and understanding the daring of filmmakers who so openly questioned the fleeting promises of the American Dream, we further appreciate the enduring allure of film noir.

Time Table (1956)

Produced and Directed by Mark Stevens

Written by Aben Kandel

Cinematography by Charles Van Enger 

Art Direction by William Tuntke

Starring Mark Stevens, King Calder, Alan Reed, Jack Klugman, and Wesley Addy

Released by United Artists

Running time: 79 minutes

THE KILLER IS LOOSE (1956)

Someday Wagner, I’m gonna settle with you for it.




The Killer is Loose has holes — blast it with a Tommy gun it has such holes. It’s a little movie with a story that churns single-mindedly forward until its title character sprawls dead on a well-kept suburban lawn and all is once again right with the world — you can get back to your TV dinner now. It asks us to swallow a lot: happenstance, strange motivations, coincidences and contrivances, maybe even a miracle or two. The story unfolds so rapidly you’ve gotta wait until the end to pick your nits; stop to raise an eyebrow and it just moves on without you, scoffers be damned. Who cares what happened to the other bank robbers? So what if the bank has a house safe instead of a vault!


Anyone conversant in B crime movies will tell you to look elsewhere if you want perfect films with plot holes a mouse couldn’t shimmy through. Instead there’s something about cheap little programmers that pulls at the gut, something so compelling it keeps prying questions at bay. We accept them for what they are, warts and all, and we grant concessions; more often than not it’s the endings: how many times have you seen a delightfully grim film noir wrecked by a “studio” wrap-up? Movies are diversionary, they aim to please, to sell tickets and popcorn; Hollywood practically invented the focus group in order to ensure audience satisfaction. With that in mind it’s surprising that an such exciting group of original and subversive films were ever produced in the first place; who cares if a few of the endings are trumped up — it’s a price worth paying.


In spite of occasionally artificial endings, low budgets, plot holes, and sometimes less-than-stellar acting, the allure of classic noir is potent. Its world is at once far-off and concocted — a not-quite-true reflection of how things were, yet one that serves as a comforting surrogate for those of us too young to have lived through the war and the decade that followed. It’s a world that tantalizes, a powerfully nostalgic world that romanticizes crime and crooks, imbuing their acts with an intoxicating veneer, a cinematic new-car smell. Although the fifties film noir is thankfully free of dead little boys in Penney’s boxes and killers with living room abattoirs, its milieu is one that ever so gradually began to resemble the world at large. Its subject matter became more in tune with social problems: the influence of organized crime, juvenile delinquency, and criminal psychosis — while its expressionistic vision began to give way to something more pedestrian, and the heart of noir crept inexorably out of the claustrophobic urban spaces, like the denizens of the city itself, into the daylight and eventually … the suburbs.


At this awkward conflux of reality and movie-fantasy that happened at the end of the classic noir cycle we find The Killer is Loose: Leon “Foggy” Poole (Wendell Corey), the inside man on a bank job, is cornered by police in the walk up apartment he shares with his wife. During the standoff she is inadvertently shot and killed. Instead of accepting responsibility, Poole blames the police for her death and swears to pay back Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotten), the dick who pulled the trigger, by killing his wife Lila (Rhonda Fleming). Poole gets transferred to the honor farm for good behavior, but escapes and sets out for revenge. The cops try to snare him, but he evades capture and eventually makes it to the Wagner home for a showdown with the waiting police.


The title itself, almost sounding more like that of a slasher film or a straight thriller, played on the fears and suspicions of a wary public. Earlier noir titles looked inward, referencing their own characters, fetishes, and narrative predicaments: Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, The Guilty, The Killers, Gun Crazy, and so forth. The locations and populace of The Killer is Loose, however, are meant to feel ordinary and familiar, and subsequently all the more terrifying. The message is that anyone could be a raving lunatic — the football coach, milkman, or the teller at the bank — and we’d never get wise. The movie spectacularly undermines the American Dream; it argues that you can’t feel safe anywhere, that the killing grounds are no longer the back alleys in the wee hours, but the suburban kitchen just after the five o'clock whistle blows. The boogeyman isn’t a slick gunsel in a fedora and trench coat, but a myopic banker with Coke-bottle glasses. Furthermore, The Killer is Loose doesn’t prop up the police as infallible pillar-of-the-community types — it needles them, makes fools of them, even emasculates them. The cops know a madman is on the prowl. They know his name, his face, and his intentions, yet with all their manpower and methodology they might as well go grab a bear claw or some scrambled eggs. In the end, it’s dumb luck more than anything else that brings the killer to his knees in an fevered hail of pent-up gunfire. Audiences must have left the theaters with a gnawing suspicion: that in this brave new world the police couldn’t protect them, and that the man selling tickets or the usher with his flashlight might harbor the darkest kind of fantasies. In an era of rampant suspicion and mistrust, The Killer is Loose was like gasoline on an already burning fire.


With revenge as a central theme, Budd Boetticher made a lot of sense as director, and owing to the great deal of critical attention he’s received in recent years it would be awfully easy (and terribly film blog-ish) to make this essay about him. Like almost every other film noir, The Killer is Loose is much more intriguing as a commentary on the cultural and social upheaval of its day than it is as simply a product of its director, in spite of the presence of thematic elements (revenge, alienation, murdered wives) that characterized Boetticher’s later westerns with Randolph Scott. Though to the director’s credit he saves The Killer is Loose from becoming a cookie cutter affair by making the revenge-seeker the most sympathetic character. Wendell Corey is hardly the performer one would expect as a psychopath; his performance must have been shocking to audiences. Corey was a professional wingman, most famously to James Stewart in Hitchcock’s Rear Window. His career included a mix of prestige pictures, second features, and TV work. He was a first-rate character actor and a hardcore alcoholic who died of cirrhosis at 54. Although not a film for which he is remembered, The Killer is Loose was his best role. He and Boetticher understood that Poole was a new-fangled psycho and they played the schmuck angle to the hilt. Those who would dismiss this as a routine programmer with a shaky story fail to recognize how important it is to the closing door of the noir cycle: Foggy Poole has a lot more in common with traditional noir heroes than most viewers give him credit for. In one of the most popular movies ever made, Paul Freeman says to Harrison Ford, “It would take just a nudge, to make you like me, to push you out of the light.” Foggy Poole is what you get if you nudge one of those famous noir protagonists — Lancaster, Ladd, Widmark — into Freeman’s abyss.


Corey’s performance is heavy on pathos and light on motivation. He’s unglamorous, frightening, and pathetic — such killers have become all too familiar to contemporary audiences, and an American TV news cliché: cut to a million next-door neighbors staring into some camera plaintively reassuring a reporter how the maniac was “such a nice, quiet guy.” But it’s important to recognize that Poole, unlike Eddie Miller in 1952’s The Sniper, is an outwardly well-adjusted member of society, appearing quite normal to those around him. In fact, we never learn why he decides to knock over his place of employment — he’s happily married, gainfully employed, and judging by the passage of time and his interaction with his coworkers and customers, perfectly reasonable. There are a few clues early on, but they fail to provide anything more than circumstantial evidence: When Poole bumps into his old sergeant at the bank, the man gets a few cheap laughs from the other bank customers at his expense: Poole wasn’t a good soldier, and the nickname Foggy was meant to ridicule. Later, in what is undeniably the film’s most gut-wrenching (and best) scene, the two men meet again under different circumstances. The point is that Poole is a psychopath — his animus can’t be justified; his desire to get even is out of proportion and entirely unwarranted, and despite a calm exterior his behavior is consistently irrational. This is best exemplified by the fact that after being assured of an early parole, Poole decides to bolt the honor farm — committing multiple murders in the act — when if he had just waited he would have earned a legal release and could have sought revenge with better odds of success.


Corey’s pathos and Poole’s relentlessness, his alienation from society and his denial of its rules is what makes him, not Joseph Cotten’s Sam Wagner, the central noir persona here — even though the movie allows the less observant viewer to dismiss him as merely the “bad guy.” And while Cotten’s police detective isn’t in any way offensive, viewers will almost be rooting for Poole to get Lila Wagner in the sights of his .357 magnum. She’s a ball and chain of the first order, and one wonders if Poole wouldn’t be doing Wagner a favor by punching her ticket. In a movie that strives to shine a light on the impotence of authority, Wagner’s relationship with his wife demonstrates that unlike the police of 1940s film noir, postwar cops no longer wear the pants in the family. This ‘crisis of masculinity’ is a significant, yet seldom discussed ingredient in the noirs of the 1950s. The suggestion is extraordinarily provocative: that if Wagner were somehow free of Lila and the burdens of consumerism, conformity, and domesticity, he might then recapture the edge that once made him a good cop. Film noir often subverts the family, giving us married cops who exchanged their brutality for a new Frigidaire and some lace doilies, becoming soft and powerless in an increasing complex and criminal world. Bud White, that most violent of policemen, would have made mincemeat out of Poole — and look at what love nearly cost him.


In the end, the extermination of Leon Poole does little to assuage our fears. Instead, audiences would have left the theater troubled, because although this killer had been stopped, others were most assuredly still out there, every bit as invisible. Four years later, an even more vividly painted and equally unexpected psychopath would follow neatly in the footsteps of Foggy Poole, like a cinematic little brother, and his impact was so staggering that it snuffed out the dying embers of film noir, and knocked the crime thriller squarely on its ass for an entire decade — until a new group of seventies filmmakers, hell-bent on a realism, would reinvent the genre, and gloriously return it to the gritty streets of the American metropolis.


And they had enough sense to give us divorced cops.

The Killer is Loose (1956)

Directed by Budd Boetticher
Produced by Robert Jacks
Cinematography by Lucien Ballard
Written by John and ward Hawkins, and Harold Medford
Art Direction by Leslie Thomas
Starring Joseph Cotten, Wendell Corey, and Rhonda Fleming
Released by United Artists
Running time: 73 minutes