After the delirious, subversively personal Glen or Glenda?, Edward D. Wood, Jr.'s subsequent stab at a noir morality play is disappointingly streamlined. The luridness of the title notwithstanding, the seedy goings-on revolve around cagey-youth-turned-armed-robber Clancy Malone, whose involvement with hammy hood Timothy Farrell leaves a cop dead in a holdup and a trail of crumbs leading up to his "world famous" plastic surgeon father (Herbert Rawlinson). It's only a matter of time before Wood is unveiling the cast's alleged prime coup (Mr. Universe and future peplum stalwart Steve Reeves, duly given a shirtless shot) or steering his puss-rearrangement gimmick toward a climactic twist that the densest of viewers will spot a block away. There are a few patented Wood non-sequiturs sprinkled throughout (He: "Carrying a gun is dangerous business." She: "So is building a skyscraper"), and the Spanish guitar plucking away on the score is a maddening touch, though the picture's ineptitude remains of the earthbound, lower-half-of-a-double-bill kind. As Farrell's dead-eyed moll, Theodora Thurman achieves a kind of almost eerie somnambulism, and the film's wormy, on-location squalidness exposes a dingy aspect of the genre usually felt-tipped by studio artifice -- yet save for an odd narrative breach detouring into Catskillian blackface (subsequently ditched for burlesque footage in later prints), the interplay between sound and image is conventional, the shots follow too cleanly into one another. It's the ultimate irony that Wood's least interesting film is the one that comes the closest to the accepted ideals of filmic "quality." With Lyle Talbot, Dolores Fuller, and Mona McKinnon. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
|