The Sniper

The most gripping movie I’ve seen in a long time is Edward Dmytryk’s “The Sniper” (1952), equal parts thriller, police procedural and a shattering look at urban loneliness and despair. It holds up extremely well.

Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz) is a lost soul with a hangdog appearance, working days as a deliveryman for a laundry service. Having deep-seated issues in relating to women, Eddie is so starved for any kind of human companionship that in one scene he walks towards a group of kids playing baseball in the street. One can tell he’s eager to engage them in conversation; anything, even the tiniest bit of human connection would be sufficient for Eddie.

At night he looks out the window through his rifle telescope, imaging the people he is going to pick off with it. Eventually the fantasy becomes reality and he begins to kill people for real. Like a psychopathic killer in later crime dramas, he sends notes to the police, begging them to stop him before he kills again.

There’s a strong cast on hand here, including Adolphe Menjou (sans moustache) as the police Lt. Kafka who leads the investigation with the help of his sergeant (Gerald Mohr). Richard Kiley makes a strong impression as the psychiatrist who knows the sniper must be stopped, but hopes Eddie can be caught alive so he can be studied in the hopes of preventing future Eddie Millers.

The movie was produced by Stanley Kramer, and his well-known liberal bent is represented by the Richard Kiley character. Kramer produced quite a few really interesting and offbeat movies in the early 1950s, and this is one of the best. The ending may disappoint those looking for a bang bang finale, but the film is much better for the ending it has.

Shot on location in San Francisco, the movie is almost documentary-like in appearance. Shot by ace cinematographer Burnett Guffey with an emphasis on flat lighting, this is no slick, glossy Hollywood production but a lowdown and dirty crime drama. It reminds me of one of those great grim and gritty 1970s crime movies like “The French Connection” (1971) or “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (1973).

The cast can’t be faulted. Arthur Franz is excellent, making the sniper curiously sympathetic - sympathetic and pitiable, but not likeable. Franz plays Eddie Miller as a character one lit match away from becoming a lighted powder keg. This probably Franz’s most nuanced performance. One can tell how much he wants to be part of something, anything, but that contact is always just out of reach.

Menjou is great as always, and it’s surprising to see the dapper actor (one of the best dressed men in Hollywood) looking decidedly un-dapper in his rumpled suits and uncombed hair.

Also, I couldn’t help but wonder what the set was like. Director Dmytryk was a former member of the Communist party and one of the Hollywood Ten who refused to name names for the Hollywood Un-American Activities Committee. He was jailed for several months before agreeing to talk. Menjou was an avowed right winger who took great delight in telling the Committee everything they wanted to know. Did Menjou greet Dmytryk as friend or enemy?

Semi-Spoiler Paragraph: In a preview of “Psycho” (1960), the sniper’s first victim is leading lady Marie Windsor who is killed about 20 minutes in. It’s a pretty graphic and shocking scene, as are all the other sniper killings. Unlike some of her other crime film appearances, Windsor is very likeable here, and I can imagine her early demise took a lot of viewers by surprise. But maybe not. I watched the trailer on the DVD and it shows her getting shot, thus proving that even in 1952, too much information was given away in the trailers. End spoiler.

For movie fans, there are a lot of familiar faces on hand. Charlie Chan’s Number Two Son Victor Sen Yung has an unbilled appearance as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant. Sidney Miller shows up as a hospital intern. I’m so used to seeing him in all those Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland musicals, that his appearance was a nice surprise.

There’s a black humor sequence where the police bring in all the perverts and sex fiends for a line-up, and the cop reading the charges can’t resist making snide comments on them to the delight of the cops in attendance. Show this scene to someone who thinks a 1952 Hollywood movie is all sweetness and light and wait for that opinion to change. The suspects in the line-up are a couple of well-known character actors who I’ve seen countless times but I don’t know their names.

Speaking of contemporary, there’s a dynamic score by Kramer’s favorite composer at the time, the controversial George Antheil, the so-called Bad Boy of American Music. Antheil’s contribution is invaluable, especially in one scene where the sniper waits to kill his next victim. We see her through her apartment window and the music is nothing more than a sustained chord, played for over 30 seconds with no variation. It’s standard practice now but very unusual for the time.

Antheil was smart enough to use this technique sparingly. Today, sustained chords are seemingly the entire score, to the extreme detriment of the material it is suppose to support. End of rant.

“The Sniper” is part of a gem of a DVD box set from Sony Home Entertainment called Film Noir Classics Vol. 1. Other titles include: Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat” (1953); “5 Against the House” (1955); “Murder by Contract” (1958) and “The Lineup.” (1958). That’s enough mean city streets mayhem to satisfy anyone.

The Fighting Kentuckian

“The Fighting Kentuckian” (1949) is a curious film in John Wayne’s career. I can see him gritting his teeth in frustration at the pedestrian role, but because he was the film’s producer, he has only himself to blame.

It comes smack in the middle of a stretch of incredible films, with a series of roles that really stretched him as an actor. “Red River” (1948), “Fort Apache” (1948), “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” (1949) and his Oscar-nominated role in “Sands of Iwo Jima” (1949) easily put to bed the stereotype of an actor who only played himself. These are some of his best performances, with each character having his own unique personality. His Nathan Brittles in Yellow Ribbon is a much different leader of men than his Sgt. Stryker in Iwo Jima.

But Wayne was still under contract to Republic Pictures, the M-G-M of Poverty Row studios. The biggest name on the Republic roster, studio chief Herbert Yates was not ready to allow his biggest star to leave for greener pastures. Loan outs were one thing, but not a complete abandonment of the home studio. To keep Wayne happy, Yates set up a production company for him, whose first film was the fondly remembered “Angel and the Badman” (1947), a solid winner for Republic.

Wayne’s second film as producer was “The Fighting Kentuckian” and it’s pretty undistinguished. As an action film, its pleasures are few and the action climax is probably the weakest and most forgettable of any Wayne film.

The film is most remembered today for giving Oliver Hardy a rare solo appearance. Wayne desperately Hardy for the role of Willie Paine, Wayne’s friend in the Kentucky unit, but Hardy refused. He felt loyal to long time screen partner Stan Laurel and did not want it to appear that the team was breaking up. Only after Stan gave his blessings to Ollie to accept the role did Hardy say yes to Wayne.

He’s a delight, as he always is, and one wishes he had been given more solo assignments. But when one realizes that the comedy relief is the best thing about a John Wayne western, you know something went wrong.

(As a boy, I had a Super 8 version of this film with select highlights, almost all of which included Oliver Hardy. The people that put together that version knew what they were doing.)

The film’s story line is promising, and somewhat unusual. Despite the film’s title, the story takes place in Alabama, circa 1818. Wayne and his band of Kentuckians help foil a plot to steal land promised to a group of Bonapartists, a group of French citizens exiled from France after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. Wayne becomes involved after falling in love with Fleurette (Vera Ralston, aka Mrs. Herbert Yates), one of the exiles.

Ralston gets a lot of flak from people. Wayne didn’t think much of her, and resented Yates’ insistence that he use her. Wayne didn’t think the Czech-born Ralston could convincingly play a French woman, and felt the film suffered for it. But she’s no worse than any other young contract player, and the film’s faults lay elsewhere.

The plot is needlessly convoluted, and one is never quite sure who is doing what to whom and why. I’ve seen the film several times over the years and some of the plot’s machinations still leave me confused. Director George Waggner also wrote the script, and he would have been better off giving the writing assignment to someone else. He and Wayne would fare much better two years later with a superior WWII submarine flick “Operation Pacific” (1951).

In addition to Oliver Hardy, the film’s highpoint is the superior musical score of George Antheil. In the 1920s and 1930s he was one of the most notorious figures of the symphonic music world, and even earned the nickname the “Bad Boy of Music.” To augment his concert hall commissions, he wrote film scores, for Cecil B. DeMille in the 1930s and in the 1940s wrote some very interesting scores at Republic. His music for one of their A westerns, “The Plainsman and the Lady” (1946), is very striking and quite modernistic.

For “The Fighting Kentuckian” Antheil provides a lovely frontier soundscape, with the late reel chase and battle scenes scored with all kinds of variations on “Comin’ Round the Mountain” and “La Marseillaise”. If Charles Ives saw this in the theater, he no doubt was nodding his head in approval.

There’s also a memorable sequence where some musicians play a very nice piece at a party, and it sounds like it could be an original piece by Antheil and not source music that he adapted. While the piece is being performed, a couple of the players (including Ollie) do solo turns, and one plays the violin with this teeth, like something one would see the Spike Jones band do. The solos are very striking, as is the entire piece, which leads me to think it’s an original Antheil composition.

“The Fighting Kentuckian” makes for pleasant viewing, but hardly memorable. It’s probably the last B-type movie Wayne would make. He was getting too big for such inconsequential assignments. I’m sure he was forever grateful to Republic for building up his career, but the time was to move on. The next year, he made for Republic “Rio Grande” with Maureen O’Hara and John Ford. Yates asked for a western from them in return for financing “The Quiet Man” (1952).

If “The Fighting Kentuckian”, in a small way, helped “The Quiet Man” get made, then I’m glad to have it.