Sudden Danger (Allied Artists, 1956)

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

At about 10:20 last night I started running a movie for my husband Charles and I, a vest-pocket 1955 thriller from Allied Artists (the former Monogram) called Sudden Danger. Thje title is a bit of a misnomer because the danger the hero, blind ex-artist Wallace Curtis (Tom Drake, whose most famous credit is as the “boy next door” Jody Garland falls for in Meet Me in St. Louis), finds himself in is not “sudden” at all. He comes home one night from the Braille Institute to find the doors and windows to his apartment sealed shut, the place full of gas and his mother, who had been living with him as his caregiver, lying in bed, very dead. His mom had been the partner in a firm called Playtime Togs, which made women’s swimsuits and sports wear. Originally Wallace’s dad had been the founding partner along with Raymond Wilkins (Dayton Lummis), and from the moment Wilkins entered, alol oozing solicitous sincerity as he offered to help Wallace in any way he can, including giving him work as a commercial artist as soon as he regains his eyesight, it was obvious to me that he would turn out to be the murderer – and indeed he did, though it took a while to discern his motive.

Mrs. Curtis’s death is ruled a suicide, but Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy Lt. Andy Doyle (Bill Elliott, top-billed and the screen’s first Mike Hammer in the 1953 film I, the Jury) is convinced that Wallace’s mom was really murdered and of course he initially suspects Wallace. Wallace’s only ally is the firm’s office manager and his girlfriend, Phyllis Baxter (Beverly Garland, quite a bit less effective as a good woman than as a bad one in most of her other movies). Lt. Doyle is able to collect samples of words typed on the various office typerwriters and figures out that the so-called “suicide note” Mrs. Curtis supposedly wrote before he offed herself was actually forged on one of the firm’s typewriters. He also finds out that Mrs. Curtis had an appointment with Harry Woodruff (Lyle Talbot, on the next-to-last stage of his career descent from working for Warner Bros. with Humphrey Bogart and Bette Davis to working for Ed Wood), na executive with a genuine fabrics company Playtime had been buying from for years. The meeting was scheduled for two days after Mrs. Curtis supposedly killed herself, and Lt. Doyle logically guesses that she wouldn’t have killed herself two days before a major appointment, especially since she’d been writing herself notes to make sure she’d remember it.

Midway through the mobile Wallace, who was blinded when he out the wrong bottle of eyedrops in his eyes (though Lt. Doyle informs him that he knows it was really his mother who did that – how did he know that?), a plot gimmick that also appeared 11 years earlier in the Lon Chaney, Jr. Inner Sanctum thriller Dead Man’s Eyes (and Chaney’s character in that film, like Tom Drake’s here, was a commercial artist before he went blind), goes through an operation in which he regains his sight. The undistinguished director of this film, Hubert Cornfeld, actually gives us the point-of-view shot the legendary Douglas Sirk should have given us in the 1953 version of Magnificent Obsession in which Wallace comes to on the operating table three weeks after the surgery and the image of his surgeon, Dr. Hastings (Ralph Gamble), gradually comes into focus. Alas, Cornfeld and the film’s writers, Daniel and Elwood Ullman (I assumed they were brothers even though they were 15 years apart in age – Daniel was born October 18, 1918 and Elwood on May 27, 1903), missed as many points as they made.

It turns out that Wilkins nas been bleeding the company dry by setting up a phony fabric company, “Regal Crest,” and writing checks to it for materials that never arrived. He’s been doing this because he’s infatuated with Vera (the electrifying Helene Stanton, playing the sort of no-good vamp character that was usually Beverly Garland’s stock in trade), a model for the company, and among other things he started embezzling to lavish the money on her. But it’s unclear whether the jewelry Wilkins has given Vera is the same as the pieces Wallace remembers his mother having, which she intended to pass down to him as heirlooms, and also in the final shoot-out between Wallace, Lt. Doyle and Wlikins, the lights go out but writers make no mention that Wallace, having recently had the experience of being blind, would be right at home in the dark and find it less of a handicap than it was for the sighted characters. It’s a good thing that the final sequence takes place largely in the dark because it’s the only sequence that looks noir, however much the movie counts as film noir thematically (though the theme of the vampy woman leading the decent but weak and sexually driven man into crime is also hinted at by the writers rather than fully developed). Still, Sudden Danger is a quite good, workmanlike thriller, and if Bill Elliott’s character gets a bit overbearing at times, at least this is one film that depicts professionally credentialed law enforcement as dogged h eroes instead of inicompetent dolts!