Crime Wave (Warner Bros., 1953)

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

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a rather interesting 1953 movie from Warner Bros. called Crime Wave, which begins in medias res with three hard-edged escaped convicts from San Quentin, “Doc” Penny (Ted de Corsia), Ben Hastings (played by a hatchet-faced young actor then known by his birth name, Charles Buchinsky, who later became an action star as Charles Bronson), and Gat Morgan (Nedrick Young, who despite the Hollywood blacklist would become a major writer for Stanley Kramer and win an Academy Award for The Defiant Ones, also a film about escaped convicts). The Terrible Trio have worked their way down south along the California coast, stealing various cars and sticking u p small-time targets along the way. Now they have arrived in Los Angeles, where they stick up a gas station just as the attendant on duty, Gus Snider (Dub Taylor), is about to hear his favorite record being played on an all-night D.J. request show: Doris Day singing “S’Wonderful.” (Even for a low-budget crime thriller with noir pretensions, Jack Warner couldn’t resist bringing in his studio’s greatest star at the time.) Morgan impersonates the attendant when a motorcycle cop rides up to investigate the situation, but the cop knows Snider personally and realizes it’s not he. The cop asks Morgan for identification, and Morgan polls out a gin and shoots him.

The cop dies and Morgan is fatally wounded, though he manages to walk a mile to the home of his former cellmate at “Q,” Steve Lacey (Gene Nelson). Lacey was paroled two years before and since then has led a law-abiding life, working as an airplane mechanic and marrying Ethel (Phyllis Kirk). Only Ethei is getting tired of all the late-night phone calls they get from various ex-cons asking Steve for help, and she’s even less thrilled when Morgan shows up at their doorstep demanding shelter. Morgan has contacted Otto Hessler (Jay Novello), a former doctor who drank himself out of a medical career and now works as a veterinarian, though he’ll still care for humans on the wrong side of the law for cash. Later Doc and Ben show up at Lacey’s place and threaten his wife if he doesn’t let them stay, and when Hessler shows up still later he steals $100 from Morgan’s corpse even though he’s dead and therefore no longer in need of medical help. Still later the Laceys and Morgan’s body get visited by Detective Lieutenant Sims (Sterling Hayden) of the Los Angeles Police Department, in what is almost certainly the nastiest portrayal ever of a cop who’s not outright corrupt. Sims is convinced that Lacey is still a crook and is masterminding the whole thing, and he goes so far as to arrest him and hold him in custody in the county jail for three days. Apparently he’s hoping the other crooks will think Lacey had ratted them out in custody and will either kill him or beat him up for doing so. Sims is confronted by Steve’s parole officer, Danny O’Keefe (James Bell, the actor who played the killer in Val Lewton’s The Leopard Man), who tries to talk Sims out of his vendetta against Steve – to no avail.

When Lacey gets out, Hastings becomes convinced that Hessler was the one who ratted them out and kills him, though a newsboy witnesses the crime and reports it to the police. In order to get to the doctor’s vet hospital, Hastings stole Lacey’s hot rod, and when the cops find it of course it has both Lacey’s and Hastings’ prints on it, making Sims even more convinced that Lacey has resumed his life of crime. Eventually “Doc” hatches an elaborate plan for which he brings in three other thugs; the caper is a robbery of a Bank of America branch in an L.A. suburb and one reason they want Steve along is that the target is just a few blocks from where Steve works and he can steal a plane and fly them to Mexico. One of the new crooks, Johnny Haslett (a marvelously twitchy performance by Timothy Carey), takes such a perverted personal interest in Ethel Lacey we’re convinced that she’s not going to make it out of the movie with her virtue intact. After the robbery proceeds, seemingly without a hitch, there’s suddenly a shoot-out inside the bank and we’re not sure why until later, when Lt. Sims explains that the cops got wind of the plan and had everybody in the bank – from the president and the tellers to the ostensible customers – replaced with police officers. In a bizarre tag scene, Sims chews out Mr. and Mrs. Lacey for not having called him earlier – the Wikipedia synopsis says Sims got wind of the robbery plan from a note Steve left in his medicine cabinet alerting them.but there’s only a vague allusion to that in the film itself – and Steve protests that the only reason he didn’t call the police directly is the crooks were holding guns on him and his wife.

The most fascinating thing about Crime Wave is the sheer venomous nastiness of Lt. Sims. The irony of this movie is that Sterlikg Hayden was far more likable and sympathetic in noir classics like John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1957), in which he played crooks, than he is here playing a cop. Even Clint Eastwood’s character in Dirty Harry (1971) and its four, count ‘em, four sequelae, wasn’t as sheerly mean-spirited as Hayden is here. Even in that final speech in which he more or less admits, grudgingly, that he was wrong about Steve, he seems to be ordering the Laceys to leave town, maybe so Steve’s old crook “buddies” will no longer be able to find them. Crime Wave is one of those movies that, as Chalres said, doesn’t seem to end so much as just stop, and one searches in vain for any evidence that Hayden’s character has learned anything from his total misjudgement of Steve.

Crime Wave was directed by André de Toth and written by Crane Wilbur – the same team as on Warners’ successful horror thriller House of Wax, made the same year (though Wikipedia gives 1954, not 1953, as the date for Crime Wave) – and the two also have two of the same actors in the casts, Phyllis Kirk and Charles Bronson. The story went through various permutations; it was originally a 1951 Saturday Evening Post short story called “Criminal Mark” by John and Ward Hopkins, and Bernard Gordon and Richard Wormser are credited with “adaptation” while Wilbur gets sole credit for the actual screenplay. It’s a film that really isn’t all that noir – though it has some noir-ish visual compositions, notably two scenes if Dr. Hessler ascending the stairs to the Laceys’ apartment (I almost inevitably joked, “Up those mean stairs aman must go … “), and the cinematographer is Bert Glennon, who learned the noir look from one of its pioneers: Josef von Sternberg, for whom he shot some of his amazing early-1930’s films with Marlene Dietrich. Crime Wave is a solid, unpretentious movie that neither achieves nor aspires to greatness – we got it paired on a DVD with Decoy, a much weirder movie but also a more adventurous one – and it was entertaining even though it was hardly at the level of Decoy, let alone the truly great noirs.