The Walking Target)Zemnotj {productions, United Artists, 1960)

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

LThe YouTube “B” movie Charles and I watched after Lies My Sister Told Me turned out to be considerably more interesting; It was called The Walking Target and was a product of Zenith Productions, a company set up to make low-budget crime films for United Artists release. It was produced by Robert E. Kent – a screenwriter notorious for being able to write a script while narrating the events of the baseball game he’d seen the night before – and directed by Edward L. Cahn, who had once been a minor fish in a big pond; He’d directed shorts for MGM in the mid- to late-1930’s and then graduated to short features for companies like PRC (where he made an auto-racing drama called Born to Speed in 1947) and in the 1950’s made mostly low-budget crime films and science-fiction fare like Invasion of the Saucer Men, It! The Terror from Beyond Space, and Zombies of Mora-Tau. Written by Stephen Kandel, who would go on to a long career on television writing for crime dramas like Batman, Mannix and the original MacGyver,

LThe Walking Target is a predictable but still interest-grabbing story about a hard-assed criminal, Nick Harbin (Ron Foster), who as the story opens is about to be released from prison following a five-year stretch for armed robbery. The prison warden, John B. Haggerty (J. Edward McKinney), warns Nick that because the $260,000 he stole from an armored truck during the robbery is still missing, he’ll be a “walking target” for both the police and other criminals who will want to hijack the loot. Though Edward L. Cahn didn’t direct the first MGM “Crime Does Not Pay” short, Buried Loot (1935), that film had a similar plot line – a convict nurses a long-term plan to get his buried loot back as soon as he finishes his bid. When Nick gets out he finds his girlfriend, Susan Mallory (Merry Anders), has taken up with his former best friend, Dave Prince (Robert Christopher). We know from the way she dresses and her obviously dyed blonde hair that Susan is not a woman to be trusted. Things get worse for Our Anti-Hero when an older crook, Arnie Hoffman (Berry Kroeger), decides to go after the loot himself. He gets Dave Prince to help him, but even Dave doesn’t know where the loot is.

LWe know, thanks to a flashback to the original robbery, which Nick planned with a partner named Sam Russo (Norman Alden) who worked out of a garage he owned as an auto mechanic. The two of them executed the robbery, only Sam got shot by a cop trying to stop the crime in progress. He ultimately died, but not before he hid the money by welding it into a hiding place he worked up in a car belonging to his wife Gail (Joan Evans, top-billed), who after his death moved to her native Arizona and set up another garage there as well as working in a café in her home town, Gold City. It’s established that Gail was Nick’s lover before she married Sam instead, and the two of them rekindle an odd but desperate relationship. Unfortunately, everyone is able to trace her there: not only the police, led by Detective Max Brodney (Harp McGuire), but also Hoffman and his gang, who send a hit squad with silencer-equipped guns. The gangsters get there well ahead of the cops and ambush Detective Brodney as soon as he arrives – though it’s not clear whether le lives or dies at the end – but eventually Hoffman and his gang members are subdued and Nick and Gail decide to present the loot to the Arizona cops so they can get free of any criminal entanglements and live the rest of their lives together as a poor but honest couple.

LThe Walking Target has been called a film noir, which it really isn’t; it harkens back to the gangster films of the 1930’s instead. Indeed, one could readily imagine this plot line being a late-1930’s Warner Bros. film, with James Cagney as Mike, Humphrey Bogart as Dave, either Joan Blondell or Ann Sheridan as Gail and Claire Trevor as Susan. Even when they weren’t set in period – like another Edward L. Cahn film, The Music Box Kid, which took place in the 1920’s (the title referenced the leading character’s Thompson submachine gun, essentially the AR-15 of its day, which he affectionately called his “music box”) – they had all the attributes of standard gangster films and the only noir-ish aspects to The Walking Target are the chiaroscuro cinematography by Maury Gertsman (who had a long career at Universal shooting mostly crime dramas and Westerns) and the femme fatale aspects of Susan’s character – and even she is not that much of a “bad girl,” just one who will take up with whatever man is available. Still, The Walking Target is a nice, exciting little movie, well acted by a cast which doesn’t contain any major names but the people who are in it are well-suited for their roles – especially Ron Foster, whose homeliness and overbearing attitude make him just right for Nick.