Without Warning! (Allart Productions, United Artists, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, July 2), once my husband Charles got back from work, I ran us a surprisingly good 1952 independent thriller called Without Warning! (the original poster art did not contain the exclamation point, but the actual credit did) which was the brainchild of three men who met each other in combat during World War II: producers Arthur Gardner and Jules W. Levy and director Arnold Laven. They got a script from William Raynor about a psychopathic killer named Carl Martin (Adam Williams) who targeted young, attractive women with blonde hair because he’d briefly been married to one, and when she left him he went crazy and targeted women who looked like his ex. Other quirks in his nature is that he always committed his murders on or about the first of a new month, and he uses a peculiar pair of garden shears as a weapon. Without Warning! isn’t a film noir either thematically or visually – almost all of it takes place outdoors in bright spaces even though yet another quirk in the murderer’s psyche is that he usually strikes at 3 a.m. – though the cinematographer, Joseph Biroc, is largely known for his noirs, including Johnny Allegro (1949), Cry Danger (1951), The Glass Wall (1953), Vice Squad (1953), World for Ransom (1954), and another Gardner-Levy-Laven production, Down Three Dark Streets (1954). But it is a quite well done thriller, part police procedural and part suspense film, and fortunately Arnold Laven and William Raynor adopted Alfred Hitchcock’s technique of letting us, the audience, know from the get-go who the bad guy is and building suspense and tension from our wondering where and how the characters will find out.

It also is a film that benefited from its no-name cast; though all the actors in it are at least competent, and Adam Williams and Meg Randall (as Jane Saunders, daughter of a garden-supply store Carl shops at regularly who just happens to be his “type”) considerably better than that, there were only two cast members I’d heard of before. One was John Maxwell (as Jane’s father) and one was Robert Shayne (playing police psychiatrist Dr. Werner – well, there had to be a psychiatrist with a German-sounding name in it somewhere!). Fortunately the people in this film are not only quite good actors, they don’t have the automatic audience associations bigger-name stars would have. Imagine this movie with Lawrence Tierney as Carl and the game would be over right away! At first the police are clueless as to how to find and capture the killer, but they get a lucky break when during one of his assaults the spring on his garden shears falls off and the police crime-scene team recovers it. Police soil chemist Charlie Wilkins (Byron Kane) analyzes the dirt on the spring and realizes it comes from three separate places, so the cops deduce that he works as a gardener and does jobs at various locations in the city. At one point the cops send out a group of policewomen who all look like Carl’s “type” and have them stake out various bars in which he might be cruising – and, in a grimly amusing scene repeated in Blake Edwards’s Experiment in Terror a decade later, one of them arrests a man whose only “crime” is trying to pick up a woman other than his wife for a casual quickie.

In another noteworthy scene, Carl is trying to flee the scene after one of his killings – this time of a woman whom he murdered in her car – when two police officers drive up on motorcycles. Carl’s first instinct is to abandon the car and flee on foot, but when the police keep approaching Carl gets back in the car and tries to drive away. One of the cops comes up to him as the car’s back wheel is stuck in a pothole and asks who the woman is and why she isn’t moving. Carl says it’s because she’s fast asleep after a long night, and when the cop thinks better of it, he inadvertently turns his back to Carl, who grabs the cop’s own gun and shoots him with it. Then his partner also tries to apprehend Carl, and Carl shoots him, too, though he recovers and gives his brethren on the force valuable information as to what Carl looks like. Ultimately the police do a canvass of all the garden-supply stores in the city and eventually they hit Saunders’s. Old Man Saunders sends his daughter out to deliver a prize orchid bush to Carl at his home in Chavez Ravine – among other things, Without Warning! is a fascinating document of what Chavez Ravine looked like before its largely Mexican-American population was driven out through eminent domain and displaced to build Dodger Stadium. (One intriguing minor character is a Mexican girl who keeps interrupting Carl’s murderous rages with demands that he fix her doll, which has literally lost her head.) There’s an exciting climax as Carl suddenly realizes that Jane is his “type” and decides to kill her, while we’re kept in suspense as to whether the police, who are there to question her dad, will get there in time to rescue Jane and arrest or kill Carl. Ultimately one of the cops kills Carl just in time to rescue Jane from his fiendish clutches. Without Warning! is an engaging film and surprisingly well-made given the probable limitations of the company’s budget, and Adam Williams’s restrained approach to playing a psycho killer was well ahead of its time, anticipating Anthony Perkins’s in Hitchcock’s Psycho by eight years.