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Not just missing but murdered, several of them, the mystery opens with the latest casualty roped in a car in front of a charging locomotive. The accused playboy (George Macready) turns out to be innocent, the sojourn on Death Row upends his mind, a door on the antiseptic sanatorium corridor opens to a raging inferno. The guilty verdict must be avenged one juror at a time, cf. Lee's Son of Frankenstein. "It has everything," enthuses the crime reporter (Jim Bannon), "horror, suspense, the danger of sudden death dropping out of the night onto unsuspecting victims." A crack Budd Boetticher whodunit with not a wasted moment in its portrait of monstrous vengeance. The number twelve is the culprit's idée fixe, the antiques-dealing blonde (Janis Carter) mentions it to her friend and the clock strikes midnight as they step out. The hero's name is Keats, his main suspect is a dapper insomniac who looks like Cézanne and enjoys dropping by line-ups at police stations before a relaxing sauna. (Mike Mazurki as the muggy masseuse rubs his shoulders while reciting Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol.") "Say, how's that for a publicity angle?" The early Hitchcock of Murder! is keenly indicated, a choice shot tracks through a dark house where a maquette of miniature nooses projects large dangling shadows on the wall. A gloved hand on the scales of justice, a camera sweeping from room to room, a screen blanched by deadly steam ahead of Mann's T-Men. "Now give me rewrite!" Boetticher reworks much of the material in Seven Men From Now. With Jean Stevens, Joseph Crehan, Trevor Bardette, and Al Bridge. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |