Follow Me Quietly (RKO, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

This morning (Sunday, May 12) I turned on Turner Classic Movies for the 7 a.m. rerun of last night’s Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation of an unusual 1949 RKO “B”-movie called Follow Me Quietly. The film was unusual in that it ran just 59 minutes at a time when even the shakiest of major studios (as RKO was in that time, especially since Howard Hughes had taken it over the year before) were moving away from “B” production as the U.S. Supreme Court’s Paramount decision forced major studios who also owned theatres to give them up, hastening the demise of the studio system that had already begun with the rise of television after World War II. Follow Me Quietly is really more of a police procedural than a film noir. It was loosely based on a story by Francis Rosenwald and director Anthony Mann that RKO had bought in 1947 after it briefly went through the hands of Jack Wrather, best known for creating the long-running radio show The Lone Ranger. Wrather was going to produce it as part of a multi-picture deal with Allied Artists nèe Monogram, which was trying to move away from its reputation as a cheapie studio who got stars on their way up and on their way down. But it fell through, and Follow Me Quietly ended up at RKO and was given to Sid Rogell, head of their “B” unit. In 1948 Rogell determined to make a police procedural that would capture some of the same essence as He Walked by Night (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2023/03/he-walked-by-night-bryan-foy.html), a 1948 Eagle-Lion release directed by Alfred Werker and an uncredited Anthony Mann (who took over the film in mid-shoot) and based on a real-life case, a former L.A. fingerprint technician named Erwin Walker who used his inside knowledge of police procedures to commit crimes. Made by yet another company (the former PRC) which was attempting to move away from “B” production and create more prestigious product, He Walked by Night was a blockbuster hit.

Its success inspired Sid Rogell to pull Follow Me Quietly out of his studio’s backfiles and greenlight it. After an unsuccessful attempt to get Mann to return to RKO to direct it, Rogell and his line producer, Herman Schlom, put Richard Fleischer on the movie as director and gave Lillie Hayward the assignment to write a script from the Rosenwald-Mann story. Fleischer was the son of animation pioneer Max Fleischer and he’d made a number of RKO “B”’s, including Bodyguard and The Clay Pigeon, before stepping up into the big leagues with Walt Disney’s 1954 film of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. (Ironically Disney and Fleischer’s father Max and uncle, Dave Fleischer, had been bitter rivals in the animation business in the 1930’s.) Follow Me Quietly was a 59-minute story about a serial killer who calls himself “The Judge” and sends notes, mostly cut and pasted from newspaper and magazine headlines, to the police announcing that his victims have done something evil and he’s punishing them on his own authority. The police assign the case to Lieutenant Harry Grant (William Lundigan, top-billed) and Sergeant Art Collins (Jeff Corey, a character actor usually cast as villains). Grant and Collins also have to deal with the interference of reporter Ann Gorman (Dorothy Patrick) from the sleazy Four Star Crime magazine. From the fragmentary clues “The Judge” has left at the scenes of his various murders – all of which take place during driving rainstorms, as if his homicidal madness was triggered by the rain – Grant and Collins commission a modelmaker to build a life-size dummy of the mystery killer. Their reproduction has a blank face but is otherwise anatomically correct and creates a spectacularly spooky effect in several scenes.

After “The Judge” has struck eight times – most recently when Grant was actually on patrol looking for him – the cops finally get the break they need when a copy of Four Star Crime is found at the scene of “The Judge”’s most recent killing. Ann, who’s previously used her “connections” to sneak into Grant’s bedroom – in an unusual Code-bending scene, she stays there while he at least starts to undress before bed, and he agrees to sign her proffered release form just to get rid of her – crashes the crime scene and notices the magazine. She uses her knowledge of the magazine’s business model to explain to Grant that the issue left behind by “The Judge” is a year old but shows no signs of wear, which means it came from a second-hand bookstore and was part of a press run specifically designed for newsstand sales. Grant and Collins canvass all used bookstores that sell back issues of magazines in the vicinity of the killings, and finally a bookstore clerk recognizes the man and tells the cops where he usually eats. A waitress at the diner he frequents (Marlo Dwyer) comes to the police station, sees the dummy posed at a mock-up of a diner table, and recognizes him as Charlie Roy (Edwin Max), a regular customer. She’s also able to tell the police where Charlie Roy lives (which appears to be the same New York brownstone exterior RKO had previously used as the building where Charles Foster Kane is keeping Susan Alexander in Citizen Kane), and the cops stake out the place. In line with the then-current trend of having action-movie climaxes take place at major industrial sites, like the Brooklyn Bridge in The Naked City (1948) and an oil refinery in White Heat (1949), Grant and Collins corner Roy at a waterworks (not a refinery, as erroneously stated on the film’s Wikipedia page). Like innumerable idiotic film villains both before and since, Roy tries to flee the cops by going up into the installation.

Grant eventually corners him and handcuffs Roy to himself, telling him to “follow me quietly” as he leads him down the water company’s stairs to street level to take him into custody. Only a previous attempt by Grant and Collins to stage a shoot-out has caused one of the water pipes to leak, and Roy sees the leak, acts as if it were rain, and freaks out. At one point it looks like he’s going to make a break for it and both he and Grant are going to die together in a fall, but luckily Grant is able to undo his half of the handcuffs and Roy finally falls to his death. Follow Me Quietly is a really quirky film, benefiting from a lot of oddball scenes – including one in which a newspaper editor who’s “The Judge”’s seventh victim insists on dictating a story to one of his staffers even though it literally costs him his life (when the cops discover him he’s badly wounded but not dead, and the police try to get him to use their ambulance and go to a hospital, but he refuses), and several scenes inside a bar called “The Tavern” whose doorman, Benny (Nestor Paiva from the first two Creature from the Black Lagoon movies), is constantly on the phone to one or more bookies to place illegal bets on horse races. It’s also a frustrating movie in that we get the impression that there was a lot more potential in the story than RKO was able to give us on a “B” budget and a 59-minute running time. One wonders, for example, why the cops never bothered to build profiles of the victims to see what they had in common, why “The Judge” had targeted them as “sinners” he needed to eliminate, and what – if anything – might have motivated “The Judge” to target them.

In his outro, Eddie Muller criticized the casting of William Lundigan as the lead investigator, noting that Lundigan had been hired on the basis of a radio broadcast that convinced an agent he’d be salable in Hollywood. Muller faulted Lundigan’s performance as too one-note and dull, and said a better actor like Dana Andrews, Robert Ryan or Lawrence Tierney might have been more able to dramatize the cop’s growing obsession with his quarry. Aside from the fact that the three actors Muller mentioned wouldn’t have been available (Andrews was under contract elsewhere, Ryan was being transitioned to more important films and Tierney was seen exclusively as a villain after his success playing gangster John Dillinger in a 1945 Monogram biopic), I think Lundigan’s taciturnicity actually makes Follow Me Quietly arguably a precursor of 1971’s Dirty Harry, also about an obsessed cop tracking down a serial killer in an urban environment. It’s indicative of how much more seriously stories like this are taken now than they were when Follow Me Quietly was made that the New York Times reviewer lambasted the film ("There is no intelligent reason why anyone should heed the proposal of Follow Me Quietly … [f]or this utterly senseless little thriller is patently nothing more than a convenient one-hour time-killer between performances of the eight-act vaudeville bill”), while modern-day reviewer Gene Triplett of The Oklahoman who saw the film on DVD wrote, “[T]his obscure gem packs a remarkable amount of thrills and dramatic weight into a mere 59 minutes.” Carl Macek, writing about Follow Me Quietly in The Film Noir Encyclopedia, called it “strangely obsessive” and linked it to other Anthony Mann films, even though (contrary to popular belief) Mann didn’t actually direct any of it. Macek said that even within a 59-minute running time, “the special ambience of Mann’s earlier noir films was captured and exploited, including the usual grotesques that inhabit Mann’s noir universe.” It’s also quirky that the opening credit gives the film’s title in cursive script, something a lot more common for romantic melodramas than crime films. Follow Me Quietly is a quite good film as it stands, but it could have been a great deal better at a 90- to 105-minute length that would have given Fleischer and Hayward more time and money to explore the real potentials of this odd but haunting tale.