Director: Don McDougall
Cast: John Bromfield, Carol Shannon, Joi Lansing, Ralph Clanton
Have I Seen it Before: Never. It wound up on the second half of a double-feature with Mysterious Intruder (1946), a film so indifferently hacked together that I fell so soundly asleep in the middle of it*, completely missed the ending, and even after reading a plot synopsis, so I’m probably never going to review that film.
Did I Like It: Had I fallen asleep through this film, I would wind up thinking that the film was just another b-noir picture. Made from the same parts in an assembly line, good enough, but unimaginative.
Then came the film’s last ten minutes. There’s a shootout, sure. There’s a fella (Bromfield) who is basically decent, but gets in a little too deep with less-than-savory elements, sure. The walls come closing in on our guy, to the point where some kind of catharsis must transpire, sure. There is some guy (Mark Dana) who’s less troubled by the world in which he finds himself, and the comeuppance comes for him far more than our guy, sure. All of that is in there. It accomplishes the self-imposed goals of the genre.
But they didn’t have to set that final confrontation on an operating roller coaster, did they? Ratcheting up the dynamic qualities of such a conclusion, probably giving a coronary to any insurance people who might have underwritten the production**, and making the film something for which no B movie has any realistic ambition: Thrilling and somehow memorable. As I’ve gone through some of these reviews in this year of the 1000th review, there have been some titles where—despite having definitely seen the film in the last two years—I have no memory of the film in question. Not so here.
*I can only hope—and not terribly confidently at that—that I didn’t snore.
**Yeah, it’s probably adorably naive of me to assume that the B-production arm of United Artists was even at all interested in the notion of insuring their productions.