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The structure is curiously akin to Waiting for Godot, two couples brushing against each other in the modernist abyss. The first duo is erected on Dragnet Bressonisms, a pair of stone-faced police inspectors (Emile Meyer and Marshall Reed) sniffing out contraband, clipped flatfoot jargon ("What's your rundown?" "We have him under 24-hour stakeout." "Sounds like the usual M.O."), tours of ballistic labs and customs offices. Their counterparts are two black-suited, sunburned Miami gunmen flying into the Bay Area, the rubout artist (Eli Wallach) who's "a wonderful, pure pathological study," and the wizened mentor (Robert Keith) who corrects his grammar and collects his victims' dying words. Their wheelman (Richard Jaeckel) pretends not to be impressed while driving the visitors from one bloody rendezvous to another. "Crime's aggressive, and so is the law." Everyone is a dedicated employee in a business, a joke appreciated by Don Siegel in scrupulous studies of the San Francisco topography. Familiar spots are suddenly mysterious: The Seaman's Club is viewed through thick sauna vapors (the pistol with silencer is wrapped in a towel), the Steinhart Aquarium is a panoply of undulating panels surrounding a sinister pickup. The sci-fi of Siegel's body snatchers is not far from this city, with its violence and pokerfaced perversities (a stash of heroin is hidden inside a Japanese doll, the gangster reaches under its dress). Sutro's Museum sets the stage for the virtuoso climax, a reworking of Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent built around multi-level setups, a skating rink, school children, and the collision between Wallach's nervous hostility and an underworld Mock Turtle on a wheelchair (Vaughn Taylor). The car chase on the precipice of unfinished freeways is a furious rough draft for Dirty Harry. With Mary LaRoche, William Leslie, Raymond Bailey, and Cheryl Callaway. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |