The Killer Is Loose (Crown Prudictions, United Artists, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 9:30 my husband Charles and I watched what turned out to be a very good movie on the “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies: The Killer Is Loose, a 1956 film based on a story by brothers John and Ward Hawkins published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1953. Even before the Post put out the story, 20th Century-Fox bought the movie rights and intended it for an all-star cast, including Victor Mature as the male lead – a police officer who investigates a bank robbery and in the process inadvertently kills the robber’s wife – and Orson Welles as the robber. (Mature and Welles had first crossed paths in the early 1940’s when they were both rivals for Rita Hayworth’s affections after she broke up with her first husband, car dealer Edward Judson – Welles won the battle and briefly married her – and again in 1961 when they finally made a movie together, an Italian sword-and-sandals epic called The Tartars.) Alas, Fox decided to pass on the property (maybe because Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck had just committed to making all his films in CinemaScope, and he ended up dumping a lot of properties, including On the Waterfront, that he didn’t think would lend themselves to wide-screen and color) and sold the rights to producer Robert L. Jenks, who organized a company called Crown to make the film for distribution by United Artists. He hired a stellar cast – Joseph Cotten as the police detective, Sam Wagner; Rhonda Fleming as his wife Lila, whom the bad guy threatens to kill because Sam killed his wife and he thinks that would be appropriate revenge; and Wendell Corey in the role of a lifetime as the bad guy.

The plot starts in the bank where Corey’s character, Oscar “Foggy” Poole, works – he’s nicknamed “Foggy,” a name he detests, because he needs really thick glasses in order to see at all. His old army sergeant from World War II shows up at the bank and rags him about his name,much to his disgust. Then a crew of robbers shows up at the bank and it looks like Poole is a hero in trying to slow them down – until later, when the cops deduce that instead of heroically trying to stop the robbers he was actually their inside man. (Charles noted that the script by Harold Medford based on the Hawkins brothers’ story doesn’t bother to explain why Poole signed in to rob his own employer’s bank in the first place.) Detective Wagner and two other officers show up at Poole’s apartment and he stages a shoot-out by firing his gun at the officers; they fire back and ultimately obliterate the front lock, but though Poole is taken alive his wife is killed and he’s broken-hearted about it. Poole is tried and convicted of his role in the bank robbery and sentenced to 10 years in prison, though his attorney tells him that if he behaves himself in prison he can get “good time” and an early release. After 2 ½ years he’s kept his record in prison so clean he’s released to the state prison’s honor farm, where they grow lettuce for the civilian market. Poole gets assigned to the honor farm but his real motive is to escape so he can hunt down and kill Lila Wagner, and one day he does so, fashioning a crude knife from the business end of one of the hoes he uses at the farm and killing the driver of the delivery truck that’s supposed to take the farm’s produce to market.

He then steals the driver’s identity documents and uses them to slip through the police roadblocks set up around the prison farm, and afterwards he kills at least two other people, including his old army sergeant after he’s crashed the sergeant’s home and terrorized his wife. Eventually he traces Lila Wagner to her neighborhood, where she’s returned after leaving the hideoot with family friends Sam arranged for her. Poole puts on a woman’s raincoat to stalk her without the police noticing, and he’s about to kill her when Sam successfully tracks him down and kills him instead. The Killer Is Loose is a taut melodrama, an example of the later 1950’s round of the film noir cycle in which instead of shooting on elaborate replicas of real streets shot in highly dramatic chiaroscuro style, the filmmakers took advantage of the greater portability of film equipment and shot on actual city streets. This loses them the high-intensity contrasty look of earlier noirs but gains in realism, and director Oscar “Budd” Boetticher and cinematographer Lucien Ballard (whom Boetticner once said was the greatest person ever to work in that job) take advantage of the real locations to produce a tightly-knit thriller. After the movie TCM hose Eddie Mueller gave some of Boetticher’s early background: he and his brother were orphans who never knew their actual family name. The “Boetticher” came from the family that adopted them, and this is the first film under which he was billed as “Budd Boetticher” instead of “Oscar.” He then went on to make a series of “B” Westerns for Columbia, mostly starring Randolph Scott, and the first of these – the very next movie after The Killer Is Loose in Boetticher’s canon – was Seven Men from Now, in which Scott played a similar character to Wendell Corey’s here: a man whose wife is accidentally killed during a robbery and who determines to track down and kill the seven men he holds responsible for her death.

While this sort of vigilante plot line works better in a Western than in a film set in the present day, in which we read Oscar Poole as a villain no matter how much we may sympathize with him over his loss (a problem Clint Eastwood faced as well in his film Mystic River, in which a group of grown men seek revenge against the people who molested them as children), Corey gets one unforgettable moment in which, explaining his behaviors to the woman he’s holding hostage, he says that because of his bad eyesight everyone around him ridiculed and bullied him except his wife, who alone loved him for who and what he was. While this doesn’t explain why he put her in harm’s way first by joining the bank robbery in the flrst place and then shooting it out with the police instead of calmly and quietly surrendering, it does give him a powerful and understandable motive for his subsequent actions. Eddie Mueller said he presented this film “live” at one of his film noir festivals with Budd Boetticner in attendance, and while Boetticher said he felt really proud to be working with an actor the caliver of Joseph Cotten – especially for a film so low-budget he had only two weeks to shoot it – while watching the film anew he noticed a certain stiffness in Cotten’s performance. I did too, but I thought the movie actually worked better that way; given that ome of the issues between Sam and Lila is over his job – she wants him to quit police work and adopt a less risky career – I think we “read” Cotten’s character as a man so pitilessly and emotionlessly committed to law enforcement (once again, a prototype of Clint Eastwood in his modern-day police officer roles) that absolutely nothing computes, including his wife’s fears.And Mueller also mentioned the sad fate of Wendell Corey, who got active in Republican politics (he saw how George Murphy and Ronald Reagan had parlayed screen careers into political success, and he got as far as the Santa Monica City Council, but his run for Congress ini 1966 went nowhere) and ultimately he died from the ill effects of alcoholism at just 54.