Experiment in Terror (Geoffrey-Kate Productions, Columbia Pictures, 1962)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, October 28) I was able once I got home just after 9 p.m. to put on Turner Classic Movies for this week’s entry in Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” series, the 1962 thriller Experiment in Terror. I got home as the opening credits were still rolling and so I was able to watch all the movie proper, though it’s not really a film noir. There are only a few scenes that contain the visual atmospherics of film noir, it doesn't have the moral ambiguity either (the good gyls are 100 percent good and the bad guy is 100 percent evil), and it’s thematically closer to a Hitchcock-style thriller than a noir. Directed by Blake Edwards and written by a husband-and-wife team called “The Gordons” (his first name, as well as his last, was Gordon – one wonders what his parents were thinking – and her name was Mildred) based on a novel of theirs called Operation Terror, Experiment in Terror deals with Kelly Sherwood (Lee Remick), teller at the Crocker-Anglo National Bank in San Francisco. (I remember the bank from my childhood in the Bay Area; it went through several changes of ownership, becoming “Crocker-Citizens Bank” and then just “Crocker Bank.”) She receives a phone call one night from a wheezing man with asthma who knows a great deal about her, including that she has a sister named Toby (Stefanie Powers) who attends high school as a senior, has a boyfriend and likes to go to a local coffee shop called The Hangout. The mystery man threatens to kill Kelly and despoil Toby (there was still enough enforcement of the Production Code for him not to make clear just what sexual abuses he had in for her) unless Kelly embezzles $100,000 from the bank and hands it over to him. Of course he warns her not to notify the police or tell anyone else, but she immediately calls the FBI and gets put in touch with special agent John Ripley (Glenn Ford, top-billed), only just as he’s connected with her, the asthmatic villain sneaks back into her apartment, kicks her to the floor and hangs up. Ripley is concerned enough that he orders his fellow agents to research by calling everyone in the local phone books named “Sherwood” to try to re-establish contact with her. Ultimately he does so and also gets the branch president, Raymond Burkhardt (William Sharon), involved.

Experiment in Terror is an O.K. thriller with some great set-pieces, including a sequence in which Kelly’s friend Nancy Ashton (Patricia Huston), a sculptor who makes and paints mannequins, is murdered by the villain and hung up in her own workshop so the cops at first think her corpse is just another one of her art pieces. Later there’s a sequence at a jazz nightclub and strip bar (actually that’s two separate establishments); the villain has summoned Kelly to meet him at the strip club. Having no idea what he looks like – Kelly has heard him on the phone but their in-person interactions have only been with him behind her – she gets into a car with a man (Al Avalon) who just approached her to pick her up for sex. Later he finds himself surrounded by FBI agents with their guns drawn, and I actually felt sorry for the guy that he just wanted to get laid and had to deal first with the woman angrily bolting from his car and then law enforcement people out to arrest him for bank robbery. Ultimately the FBI is able to learn the suspect’s identity; he is “Red” Lynch (Ross Martin), and he’s pulled this scam before in other cities – including on one woman in Oklahoma whom he killed when she wouldn’t cooperate. They learn, among other things about him, that he’s into dating Asian women, and they trace a girlfriend named Lisa Soong (Anita Loo) who’s evasive and doesn’t want to rat him out. We learn why when Special Agent Ripley (whom I couldn’t help but think of as “The Untalented Mr. Ripley”) interrogates Lisa’s seven-year-old son Joey (Warren Hsieh) and learns that he knows the man as “Uncle Red.” Lisa explains that Joey is disabled and “Uncle Red” is paying for his medical treatments, albeit with the money he’s making from his embezzling schemes. Through a tip from a police informant named “Popcorn” (Ned Glass), the FBI are able to trace him. Red kidnaps Kelly’s sister Toby and makes her strip to bra and panties; he does something else to her that we can only guess at but it traumatizes her enough that when the cops finally rescue her she’s visibly shaken.

He then sends Kelly a package containing Toby’s sweater and a ticket to a baseball game at Candlestick Park, where he wants the actual handoff of the money to take place. (This film simultaneously nailed one of my pet peeves about movies – Lee Remick and Stefanie Powers looked enough alike they were believable as sisters – and hooked one of Charles’s: Kelly is supposed to be carrying $100,000 in $20 bills in a purse way too small to contain that amount of money.) Red disguises himself to get close enough to Kelly to grab the money, but the cops are on to him. He tries to hide out in the crowds leaving the ballgame (according to Eddie Muller, the sequence was shot during a real baseball game at Candlestick Park on August 18, 1961), only when he realizes the cops are onto him he tries to flee across the now-deserted playing surface and the cops shoot him down, His body falls picturesquely across the pitchers’ mound. Certainly Experiment in Terror is, shall we say, “influenced” by Alfred Hitchcock, especially in having its final sequence take place at a big public location (like the British Museum in Blackmail, the Statue of Liberty in Saboteur and Mount Rushmore in North by Northwest), though to his credit Blake Edwards got considerably more out of his big public set-piece ending than Mick Jackson did in the film The Bodyguard, which ends with an unthrilling sequence of a crazed killer stalking a celebrity at the Academy Awards. (When my husband Charles and I saw The Bodyguard I wrote, “As Jackson futzes around with this sequence and gives us his usual Cuisinart editing style one can only think — regretfully — of what Alfred Hitchcock could have done with the situation of a killer intending to murder a celebrity in the middle of the Academy Awards.”) I remember watching Experiment in Terror with Charles years ago and thinking that the title was a bit of a misnomer – there was nothing the slightest bit “experimental” about the terror the Gordons put Kelly Sherwood through (and the novel’s original title, Operation Terror, might have worked better for the film as well) – but it’s an O.K. movie with some great sequences even though it’s really not a film noir.