The Yellow Canary (Cooga Mooga Producitons, 20th Century-Fox, 1963)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Before Turner Classic Movies’ “Noir Alley” presentation last night (Saturday, September 5, 2026), I warned my husband Charles, “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that TCM is restoring their ‘Noir Alley” feature tonight after a month of ‘Summer Under the Stars.’ The bad news is they’re doing it with a film starring Pat Boone.” The film was The Yellow Canary, made in 1963 on a deliberately restricted shoestring budget provided by 20th Century-Fox, and it was Boone’s attempt to get the world to take him seriously as an actor and not just an innocent juvenile lead. Boone’s reputation can be summed up by his insistence, when he’d had to kiss Shirley Jones for the film April Love five years earlier, that his wife be on the set to chaperone him. This time he chose to play Drew Paxton (that’s his on-stage name; off-stage he’s known as Andy), a professional singer who unlike the real Pat Boone is a womanizer whose main concern at the start of the film, as he’s preparing to go on at the Huntington Hartford Theatre (Huntington Hartford was a man who inherited a fortune and burned through it all on art-related charities), is keeping his wife Lissa (Barbara Eden) from running into his girlfriend de jour. Paxton is also an egomaniac, which we can see from the posters advertising his appearance: “The Great Drew Paxton,” “The Sensational Drew Paxton,” “The One and Only Drew Paxton,” and the like. By this time Boone had changed his stage act so instead of singing hilariously lame covers of great rhythm-and-blues/rock ‘n’ roll songs like Little Richard’s “Tutti Fruitti” and Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” he was going for the Frank Sinatra market, singing crooner material like “I’m Shooting High” and “I Can’t Begin to Tell You” while wearing a bow tie on stage the way Sinatra had 20 years earlier. The plot kicks into high gear when Andy returns from his gig with Lissa and they discover that their two-year-old son has been kidnapped and his nanny murdered. Andy, at least in part to atone for the fact that he’s had virtually no part in his son’s life until now because he’s been busy on the road singing (and no doubt indulging in extra-relational activities), is determined to do literally anything it takes to get his son back alive.

He runs afoul of the police official assigned to the case, Lieutenant Bonner (Jack Klugman), through his insistence on going after the kidnappers himself and doing whatever they ask. When the kidnappers send a ransom note demanding $200,000 in non-sequential $10 bills, Andy demands that his business manager Ed Thornburg (Jesse White) liquidate his investments to come up with the cash and do it as soon as possible. Andy gets the cash and fills a valise with it. (I asked Charles if the valise on screen looked big enough to hold $200,000 in $10 bills, and he said it did but that would also be far heavier to carry than it looks on screen.) On the kidnappers’ instructions he goes with the cash to the Santa Monica pier and waits in vain all night because the ransom note turns out only to be a dry run to see if he’d follow orders. Gradually Andy deduces from the level of knowledge the kidnappers have about his plans, including the signal they instructed him to give – he was supposed to sing the song “You’ll Never Know,” which he was rehearsing for his next album but had never sung in public before – that it was obviously an inside job. He first suspects Bake (Steve Harris), who’d stolen $10,000 from him by forging his signature on a note allegedly authorizing him to cash in that amount in bonds, but after the police arrest Bake for that crime and Andy bails him out, the next time we see Bake is as a corpse hanging from a tree outside Andy’s house. Ultimately the real culprit turns out to be [spoiler alert!] his boyhood friend Hub Wiley (Steve Forrest, real-life brother of Dana Andrews), whose motives remain unclear. Hub had given Andy a gun, allegedly to protect himself against the kidnappers when he finally paid the ransom, but unbeknownst to Andy he’d filed down the firing pin so the gun wasn’t usable. Lt. Bonner noticed that about the gun and apparently Andy had the gun repaired so it would be usable. A previous scene had taken place at a beachfront property called the Spindrift Inn, run by a couple named Joe and Renée Pyle (Jeff Corey and Jo Helton; Corey was also credited as “drama consultant” because he coached Boone on his acting; he'd been driven from the screen by the House Un-American Activities Committee but he and Boone became friends despite their immense political differences, and apparently during the years he was off screen he ran an acting school in L.A. whose students included James Dean, Carol Burnett, and both Peter and Jane Fonda), who unbeknownst to Andy were hiding out his baby by covering up with a baby of their own. Ultimately Andy figures it all out when he finds sand in Hub’s shoes, indicating he’s been to a beach location recently, and he and his wife Lissa (ya remember Lissa?) go there and recover the baby after a nicely done suspense sequence by director Buzz Kulik.

The Yellow Canary had an interesting genesis; it was based on a novel called Evil Come, Evil Go by “Whit Masterson,” who like “Ellery Queen” was actually a collective pseudonym for two people: in this case Robert Allison Wade (1920-2012) and H. William Miller (1920-1961). “Whit Masterson” is best known today for their novel about a corrupt cop, Badge of Evil, which Orson Welles filmed in 1958 as Touch of Evil. The screenplay was by Rod Serling, though Eddie Muller said it wasn’t one of his better efforts. The Yellow Canary is actually a pretty good movie, with authoritative performances from Barbara Eden and Jack Klugman, though if Pat Boone was hoping that this film would transform his career the way Murder, My Sweet had with Dick Powell nearly two decades earlier, he was sorely disappointed. It’s all too obvious that the opening scenes are merely nice young Pat Boone playing an asshole and not being very convincing at it (though if we’d actually got to see his paramour instead of merely hearing about her, the film might have been more convincing as noir). Incidentally the filmmakers ran out of money and Boone had to pay to finish the film himself, with the result that the closing credit goes not only to 20th Century-Fox but to Boone’s own company, “Cooga Mooga Productions”! The Yellow Canary actually reminded me not only of High and Low, Akira Kurosawa’s masterpiece, made the same year, and also about a man whose child is kidnapped – though in a neat plot twist courtesy of Ed McBain, who wrote the original novel, King’s Ransom, on which High and Low was based, it’s actually the son of his chauffeur, not his own, who’s been kidnapped – who antagonizes the police by insisting on going after the kidnappers himself (and Toshiro Mifune, Kurosawa’s star, has far more action cred than Pat Boone!), but also the 1992 film The Bodyguard (which I posted about at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2012/02/bodyguard-warner-bros-1992.html). Both The Yellow Canary and The Bodyguard are about celebrities who get plunged into life-or-death threats by criminal conspiracies hatched by people in their entourages and therefore known to them (in The Bodyguard Whitney Houston’s older sister hires a hit man to assassinate her during an Academy Awards ceremony) and in both films the celebrity lead is also attacked on another front (in The Bodyguard it’s a deranged fan sending her threatening letters), and both are beset with leads who deliver mediocre performances even while essentially playing themselves. One thing that amused me was that the restoration credits on The Yellow Canary indicate that Jello Biafra, of all people, made a major donation to cover the restoration costs: a weird no-degrees-of-separation connection between two singers with quite different career trajectories!