Director: Richard Fleischer
Cast: Lloyd Bridges, Barbara Payton, John Hoyt, James Todd
Have I Seen it Before: Never. Between the head cold that wouldn’t die, and the general feeling of exhaustion that filled the universe last fall*, I’ve been slacking on attending Circle’s regular Noir Night. Throw in the fact that before the movie they ran the 1923 animated short from Fleischer’s father, also titled Trapped, I can’t help but marvel that I go to one of the only theaters that still runs cartoons before a movie.
Did I Like It: Even beyond the amenities of the screening, it’s good to be back in the dim world of Noir. There’s something so simply intuitive about putting a hard on their luck schlub in the pursuit of an easy payday only to be completely ruined by that fantasy (it’s a fantasy at the moment) of consequences. Trapped hits all of the beats one would expect and need from the genre. There’s even a blonde (Payton) lurking around the edges of the film who can vacillate between victim and Iago-like manipulator for good measure.
But then the film takes a weird turn. All throughout the runtime, Stewart (Bridges) feels like the main character. He’s the schemer who is one step ahead of the coppers who are trying to bring the gifted forger back into justice. Most of the first act centers on his escape. Then, with twenty minutes left to go, Bridges gets arrested again. One might think he’s got a whole other escape in him before the end credits unfurl, but no. Lloyd Bridges suddenly becomes Sir Not Appearing In This Film. The final twenty minutes involves the Secret Service tightening their noose around a completely different character, Jack Sylvester (Todd).
This might have struck me as a flaw of the film, if it weren’t for the fact that we were all told before the film began that Bridges got quite sick in the middle of production, and with a B production there was no time to wait for him to get better. So it’s suddenly a story about Sylvester. Without Fleischer at the helm, this could have been a real mess, instead of a slightly off-beat one. It’s a testament to Fleischer’s skills that he could make as much lemonade out of the lemons available.
Just imagine how bad Conan the Destroyer (1984) would have been if Fleischer hadn’t been around to keep things under some degree of control.
*Now that that’s over with…