I WOULDN'T BE IN YOUR SHOES (1948)

It opens, this thing, on death row. A nameless penitentiary squats next to a river that turns over and over, churning like the guts of the suckers wasting away inside its walls. Three hours to go until the lights flicker and the warden once again flips the switch on the vacancy sign. It’s Number Five’s turn tonight, and he’s got no taste for the meal that arrives hot under a silver platter. Number Three puts on a record, hoping to take Number Five’s mind off the ticking of the clock, which echoes so loudly that not even the crashing of the river can drown it out. The other doomed men whisper to him from up and down the block, “Talk boy, tell us how you got here. Talking takes your mind off things when you’re up close to it.” So Number Five hunkers down onto the rack, probably for the last time, and gives. It has to do with a dead man, a wallet full of big bills, and a pair of dancing shoes.

“Where you been?” he remembers asking her.

“Around the world in a rowboat.” She said, her lips barely moving, tired after yet another night on her feet, eyeballing the bed and longing for the numbness of sleep. Give her a few hours and she’ll come back to life, having momentarily forgotten the too-tight heels, the threadbare dress, those same old tired records, and the wretched breath of lonely, clutching men.

It stings to look at her, to think about what she does for the rent. He isn’t pulling his own weight — they live off her sweat and tears. They both used to be real dancers, but that was a lifetime ago. The city was magnificent when the war was on, bright and abundant with six-week contracts, every grinning theatrical man’s door wide open. Not now though. In the months since it ended and the naval yard in Brooklyn began to teem with men again — older now, their eyes different — the nightclub gigs dried up and the city boiled down to this one room apartment and the dark alleys that surround it on all four sides.

He remembers his anger that night, the tangy flavor of it, remembers throwing one new dancing shoe, then the other after the alley cats bleating on the fence outside their window. The shoes were a gift from her, a sign that she still hoped, but to him they were just another reminder of his failure. He shut his eyes thinking he’d either get the shoes back in the morning or he wouldn’t, but when he dragged himself out of bed they were already there, leaning neatly up against the flat’s scarred door. He should’ve figured the shoes’ reappearance was fishy. If he wasn’t such a dumb cluck he would have thrown them in the incinerator.

Maybe he should have gotten wise later that afternoon, when he found the wallet and the money on the street. Third-rate hoofers like him didn’t catch breaks, there was something else at work here. It was if the thing had been put there just for him, where only he would find it. He had pounded this stretch of sidewalk, from one dour theatrical man’s locked door to the next, so often that he could do it through the haze that his life had become. He could have, should have turned it in — he wanted to, really — but she lit up when she saw the bills. She thought of the money as their ticket out, to the coast and maybe a chance in the movies, and what good was a man if he couldn’t give his girl the things she wanted?

But the cops had his number. They had taken a plaster of the footprint at the murder scene — in the alley right outside the apartment window. They knew it was a tap shoe. They knew the damn thing belonged to a man of his size and build. They started watching him and waiting for him to spend the money. It was a Bakelite radio that fouled them up, and not even a good one. Can’t a man buy his wife a radio without being hauled in for murder? Not in this nightmare. Now in a few hours, at midnight, this first Tuesday after Christmas, the lights will flicker and a day or two later some other sap will take his place, and the others will call him Number Five. He’ll have a story of his own to tell, and a river that listens.   

I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948)

Directed by William Nigh

Screenplay by Steve Fisher

Story by Cornell Woolrich

Starring Don Castle, Elyse Knox, Regis Toomey

Cinematography by Mack Stengler

Released by Monogram Pictures (Walter Mirisch Productions)

Running Time: 70 minutes

OUTSIDE THE WALL (1950)

Larry Nelson gets thirty years in a big boy cell after he accidentally snuffs a reform school guard. But fifteen years later, he’s a rehab poster boy: educated, good-looking, trained in the prison infirmary, the pride of inmates and staff alike. Best of all, his parole just came through. It ain’t all rosy though: Nelson is institutionalized and nervous to leave “home,” never having lived on his own. He’s also never driven a car, had a bank account, or taken a drink. He’s practically a doctor, but knows nothing of the birds and the bees. With the promise of a job at the city hospital and $600 in the breast pocket of his prison-issue suit, he hits the busy streets of Philadelphia, braced for a new life somewhere Outside the Wall.

And he ends up washing dishes at a greasy spoon. The hospital’s applications and background checks — not to mention candy stripers — scare the hell out of him. At first pots and pans suit Nelson just fine, but when a pair of stick-up men crash the diner he decides that big city life is just too much to handle. He hoofs it out of town and into rural Jewel Lake, where he answers a help wanted ad at the local TB sanitarium. The lab job pays little more than room and board, but the boss doesn’t ask too many questions. Nelson settles in with ease, and soon earns the respect of his superiors and the attention of two pretty nurses. Elegant brunette Ann (Dorothy Hart), is the girl next-door type, while Charlotte (Marilyn Maxwell) is an ambitious blonde who likes men with “nice cars and money to spend.” Hard-to-get Charlotte is everything Nelson ever dreamed of in a skirt, but he needs a ragtop and wad of cash before she’ll give him the time of day.

Back in Philly, ex-cons take an armored car for a cool million. Their tuberculosis-stricken leader, Jack Bernard (John Hoyt), needed a big score to bankroll his remaining years. Back in Jewel Lake Nelson couldn’t care less about the headlines — until Bernard checks into the sanitarium. The convalescing crook needs a courier to run weekly payoffs to his scheming ex-wife Celia (Signe Hasso), who he fears might flip on him for the reward. Nelson agrees — tired of getting the cold shoulder from Charlotte. Celia wants the entire million though, and hires thugs Red (Lloyd Gough) and Garth (Henry Morgan) to help her get it. Bernard is the only one who knows where the money is, but Celia and her boys wrongly assume that Nelson was in on the heist and try to torture the information out of him. He escapes and hurries back to the sanitarium, where he finally sees Charlotte’s true colors and turns his attention to Ann, confessing his knowledge of the heist as well as his past. She’s elated, but insists that before they can be together he has to come clean with the cops. Meanwhile, Celia and her goons are barreling to the sanitarium for a final reckoning with destiny…

This is a solid crime picture, even if it isn’t a full-bodied film noir. Larry Nelson comes to grips with freedom altogether too quickly and too well. He isn’t plagued by the crushing insecurity, self-loathing, or self-doubt that makes Steve Cochran’s character in Tomorrow is Another Day (1951) infinitely more interesting. (That special movie also manages to capture the bad blonde and the angelic brunette in the same character!)  Nor is Nelson the product of the typical noir prison, as in Brute Force, but rather the very real Eastern State Penitentiary — Cherry Hill — where the golden rule was rehabilitation. Instead of cruel treatment and an uncaring bureaucracy, he is carefully educated and highly trained. The system dotes on him. And the everyday folks he bumps into aren’t suspicious or frightened noir regulars. Instead of being shunned, exploited, or ripped off, the people of Outside the Wall try to lend a helping hand: the warden lines up a job, a uniformed cop helps him navigate traffic, and instead of looking for a kickback, his boss at the diner is ecstatic to have found such a hard worker. Sure, a barfly tries to lift his wallet, but he swats her away with ease.

Speaking of Nelson, his feathers never get ruffled, even though he’s got zero life experience. He isn’t paranoid or desperate — he’s not even mildly neurotic — and like a jailhouse Sam Spade he uses his prison smarts to stay a step ahead everyone else. But even if we don’t have both feet fully in noir territory here, Outside the Wall is plenty worthwhile. Marilyn Maxwell has a lot of fun making like a bad girl, and Harry Morgan is a grotesque (if underutilized) villain even by his lofty standards — like a pint-sized inquisitor gets people to spill by jamming scalpels underneath their nails. Noir or not, this is unabashedly a crime film, and occasionally a brutal one.

I’m ambivalent about the bland Richard Basehart, even though his early movie career is steeped in noir, and Outside the Wall was one of his better roles. I’ve read much about what a great actor he was, and how he could have been big star if only Hollywood had given him the chance. Rubbish. Basehart was good-looking in a vanilla sort of way and he had some depth, but he lacked above-the-title, big star screen charisma — and said so himself. Rather than compare him to Burt Lancaster, the bland Basehart was rather a stone’s throw away from Kent Smith, which, in the end, isn’t a terrible thing. Both enjoyed lengthy careers and appeared in more memorable films than most actors could have dreamed of. Maybe Basehart simmered a bit more than Smith, but he was certainly no Lancaster.

One of the best things about Outside the Wall is writer-director Crane Wilbur’s dialog: “You’re being born all over again kid, except this time you’re a man.” “Where you been all your life?” “I just found out what money can buy.” “I always was a sucker for a dame.” Smart, pulpy stuff that sometimes hints at epigram and always makes me smile. Wilbur had a thing for prison pictures. He penned a bunch of noir screenplays, most dealing with jailbirds and ex-cons. A Hollywood lifer with who began as an actor, he wrote for the ear and punctuated his scenes with good lines, no matter what he was working on — it’s hard to imagine that screenplays as contradictory as The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima and House of Wax both sprang from his typewriter in the same year (1953). But if Wilbur was a fine writer he was a pedestrian director. Canon City (1948) and Outside the Wall are plenty good enough, but they pale next to He Walked by Night and CrimeWave (1954), Wilbur scripts brought to the screen by more gifted directors.

Outside the Wall is cheap, enjoyable, unspectacular, and entertaining. It has too much brotherly love for a bona fide film noir, but it offers a rare glimpse at the mid-century streets of one of America’s great cities, and it serves up plenty of what crime and noir fans get jazzed on: prisons and parolees, bad girls, torturous thugs, and killers who pull heists with hand grenades. Everything about it may have been done better in some other picture, but what’s not to like?

Outside the Wall (1950)

Written and Directed by Crane Wilbur

Starring Richard Basehart, Marilyn Maxwell, Signe Hasso, John Hoyt, and Harry Morgan
Cinematography by Irving Glassberg
Released by Universal International

Running time: 80 minutes

UNCHAINED (1955)

Jail was on everyone’s mind in the fifties. During the war years, prison populations in the United States had been greatly reduced while inmates were paroled into the armed services. Yet in the years immediately afterwards crime rates spiked, heavily taxing the federal prison system as well as those of many states. Conditions worsened as convict populations rose, leading to an epidemic of prison riots that swept the country in the early fifties. One source notes twenty riots in 1952 alone. Inmates blamed overpopulation, inhumane facilities, hard labor, and rampant corruption as reasons for the unrest — and the Eisenhower government was ready to listen. In contrast to a veneer of conservatism, conformity, and material culture, it was an era of progressive ideas, of the burgeoning civil rights movement, of the rise of the social sciences, and of sweeping societal reform. The prevailing attitude towards the prison system underwent fundamental changes, even the nomenclature itself changed: institutions began to be referred to as correctional facilities rather than penitentiaries. Prisoners were no longer behind bars solely to be punished or simply removed from decent society; they were there to be educated, rehabilitated, and reintroduced as productive citizens.  

In this as in most things, Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon, putting a new spin on one of the movie industry’s oldest staples: the prison picture. A spate of new movies hit theaters and drive-ins, running the gamut from prestige to B-grade productions. They focused on men, women, and juvenile delinquents; gangsters, career crooks, or first-time losers — surviving on the inside, trying like hell to get out, or headed for the gas chamber. Exploitation, exposé, film noir, or even glossy melodrama. The subject of this piece is 1955’s Unchained. With only 53 votes on IMDb it’s one of the forgotten films of the period — every one of its reviews was written by someone with vague memories of seeing it as a youth. Unchained’s greatest claim to fame is as the source of the Oscar-nominated song Unchained Melody, sung on-screen by actor Jerry Paris and eventually recorded and made famous by the Righteous Brothers. It’s a shame, as the film has plenty to offer, especially to those interested in crime and prison films.

Made in the spirit of rehabilitation and reform, the Unchained tells the story of Chino, or the “Prison without Walls,” and, as stated in the film’s closing title card, is “suggested by the life and work of Kenyon J. Scudder, and by his book Prisoners are People.” Chino opened in 1941 as the California Institution for Men, the largest minimum-security prison, or “honor farm,” in the world. The rules were simple: no walls, no armed guards, no gun towers; the only barrier between the inmates and the outside world is a livestock fence — in an early scene the warden shocks the new men by showing them how to go over without cutting their hands on the wire. Inmates live in dormitory style housing and are free to visit with family and friends every weekend. Opportunities for self-improvement and self-governance abound. Only one in four California prisoners are eligible for incarceration at Chino, yet any man who flees is barred from return and must do the rest of his time with the hard boys at Folsom or the big Q. And as opposed to other such prisons, the inmates at Chino are selected for their temperament rather than the nature of their offense, meaning that the population is composed of everyone from murderers and armed robbers to mere paperhangers and bunco artists.


The notion of easy escape forms the dramatic thrust of the film. All of the young men inside are grappling with the idea, while most of the older inmates have made their peace with it. Steve Davitt is a Montana bumpkin doing a first-offender sentence for aggravated assault — he beat up an employee he believed had stolen from him. Davitt is young, entitled, and not used to living by anyone else’s rules. He thinks himself unfairly jailed, and wants to get out to be with his wife and son. Joe Ravens (Jerry Paris), an older man doing time for murder, takes Davitt under his wing spends the majority of Unchained’s brief running time trying to convince Steve to buck up and serve out his small sentence. The unlikely friendship between the older black man and his young white protégé has predictable ups and downs, and culminates in the film’s unexpected and surprising final scene. Along the way there are numerous subplots involving other inmates, most of which riff on Chino’s rule that allows the men weekly contact with members of the opposite sex. A piano player with busted fingers finds love, while a thief with a peroxide blonde realizes she just wanted him for the loot. And of course there are the men that take advantage of the system, trying to gain power or find an easy way out — with plenty of fisticuffs and even a play on the famous blowtorch scene from Brute Force. At each and every turn warden Scudder is involved, helping the good guys and sending the hoods on their way to San Quentin.

Unchained has an intriguing cast, beginning with star Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch. Certainly Hirsch was no actor, but he isn’t terrible either — the sort of guy who hits his marks and reads his lines, albeit too stiffly for a film career that would outlast his popularity as an athlete. His appeal to Hollywood producers was understandable — he stood well over six feet, with blonde hair, a square chin, and chiseled, all-American features. The Wisconsin-born Hirsch was an all-American running back at Michigan, the only athlete in school history to letter in four sports in a single year. He spent a decade with the L.A. Rams, eventually to be elected to the NFL Hall of Fame. He retired as the University of Wisconsin’s athletic director in 1987. Hirsch’s stint as a movie star was entirely contained in his tenure with the Rams. His first film was Crazylegs (1953), another Oscar nominee in which the running back starred in his own life story. He followed with Unchained, and then played co-pilot to a nervous Dana Andrews in 1957’s Zero Hour!, his last film.

The slickest and most ironic bit of casting is Chester Morris as warden Scudder. Forgotten by the general public, Morris was nevertheless a movie star of the first order for more than two decades, from the advent of talking films throughout the forties. He was often cast as a gangster, and his greatest roles came as the good-looking lead in a pair of crime films, Alibi (1929) for which Morris was a best actor nominee, and The Big House (1930) — the granddaddy of all Hollywood prison pictures. As a matter of fact, in 1930 Morris had one of the best years in film history: he was the male lead in seven films, with eight Oscar nominations between them, including the Norma Shearer best actress statuette winner, The Divorcée. In 1941 Morris appeared in his first Boston Blackie film, and would reprise the role more than a dozen times throughout the decade. The series of immensely popular B comedies revived his acting career, and led to a further two decades of television work. Morris’s career would touch seven decades, but ended sadly when he committed suicide while undergoing cancer treatment in 1970.


In the end, the progressive vision that resulted in a prison like Chino just couldn’t last forever. As American culture transformed throughout the Vietnam era and politicians eventually launched the “war on drugs,” correctional populations increased dramatically. Chino has long ceased to be known as the “prison without walls,” and is depicted in an entirely different light in the 1998 film American History X, in which Edward Norton’s character serves hard time for manslaughter and Chino subjects him to the worst prison life has to offer.

Unchained (1955)

Written, Produced, and Directed by Hall Bartlett
Starring Elroy “Crazylegs” Hirsch, Jerry Paris, Barbara Hale, and Chester Morris

Cinematography by Virgil Miller

Based on the book Prisoners are People by Kenyon Scudder

Distributed by Warner Bros.

Running time: 75 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