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A busy Los Angeles intersection is still an Old West crossroads to Budd Boetticher, he tilts down from a street sign to a hoodlum in fedora and shades in a shot that goes into À Bout de Souffle. Manning the loan company counter is the soldier once dubbed "Corporal Foggy the Jungle Killer" (Wendell Corey), his back to the camera until the robbery alarm reveals a heavy brow and anxious eyes behind thick specs. It's an inside job, the police catch up with him and his wife dies in the crossfire. ("I wasn't even alive before her," he eulogizes, cradling her body.) At the trial, his blank gaze turns to the wife (Rhonda Fleming) of the cop responsible (Joseph Cotten), from there it's a slender trail separating prison camp and picket-fence neighborhood. "Ever get used to it?" "No, but you get numb." On an even keel between the noir of crime expressionism and the gris of police procedural, Boetticher ponders the vengeful psycho-schnook in fascinated horror, the "obliquely slanted type" who's quite a study in nearsighted, squashed masculine obsession. With revolver in hand, he invades the kitchen of his Army sergeant (John Larch) and remembers wartime taunting and redemptive love, a frieze of bluff and revelation suddenly exploded like a milk bottle shattered by a bullet—ten minutes worth more than the entirety of The Desperate Hours. The rope-tight storytelling builds to a remarkable climax in which stakeout rifles, shortwave transmitters and cross-dressing killers chip away at the bogus sanctuary of suburbia. "Could've been worse." "It was worse, remember? I remember." The arena cleared, the director is ready to ride into the desert with Randolph Scott. With Michael Pate, Alan Hale Jr., Virginia Christine, and Dee J. Thompson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |