Among the Living (1941)

User Rating:

6.5/10   

Director:

Stuart Heisler

Writers:

Lester Cole (screenplay)
Lester Cole (story)

Release Date:

19 December 1941 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Film-Noir | Thriller

Tagline:

What horrible fascination did this monster have for women?

Plot:

A mentally unstable man, who has been kept in isolation for years, escapes and causes trouble for his identical twin brother.

Plot Keywords:

Twins | Insanity | Death Certificate | Escaped Mental Patient | Beautiful Woman

Cast

Albert Dekker	...	John Raden / Paul Raden
Susan Hayward	...	Millie Pickens
Harry Carey	...	Doctor Ben Saunders
Frances Farmer	...	Elaine Raden
Gordon Jones	...	Bill Oakley
Jean Phillips	...	Peggy Nolan
Ernest Whitman	...	Pompey
Maude Eburne	...	Mrs. Pickens
Len Hendry	...	Clerk
Frank M. Thomas	...	Sheriff
Harlan Briggs	...	Judge
Archie Twitchell	...	Tom Reilly
Dorothy Sebastian	...	Woman in Cafe
William Stack	...	Minister
Ella Neal	...	1st Mill Girl

Runtime:

67 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Mirrophonic Recording) | Mono

Certification:

Finland:(Banned) (1943) | Sweden:(Banned) (1942)

Company:

Paramount Pictures

Trivia:

One of over 700 Paramount Productions, filmed between 1929 and 1949, which were sold to MCA/Universal in 1958 for television distribution, and have been owned and controlled by Universal ever since.

Quotes:

[Eyeing Raden's bankroll]
Millie Pickens: Say, if I had a wad of folding dough like that I'd go right out and buy an outfit that would knock this neighborhood cockeyed!

AMONG THE LIVING (Stuart Heisler, 1941) ***

I’d always been interested in this one – not least because it involves twins (and, thus, reminiscent of the Boris Karloff vehicle THE BLACK ROOM [1935]) – so that when I came across the film, even if I knew that the quality would be far from optimal, I leapt at the chance to acquire it. While not strictly horror, it involves several elements that are part and parcel of the genre – old dark house, family secret, madness, murder, mob fury, etc.

Despite, as I said, the fact that the video was rather fuzzy – so that the images generally lacked detail – I was nonetheless struck by the film’s cinematography and editing: these were particularly effective during a scene at a bar, where the mad brother (who had been secluded all his life but has now broken loose) is ridiculed by the customers, and the one following it where he chases a girl into an alley and kills her. The two central roles are played by Albert Dekker and he does very well by both, though the mad brother is obviously the showier character – which he invests with a remarkable vulnerability (when seeing the locals indulging in a particularly animated jitterbug routine, he naively asks his future victim who’s accompanying him at the time “What are they doing?”); incidentally, despite the narrative’s Gothic – or, more precisely, Southern – trappings, the setting is a contemporary one.

The supporting cast is a good one and includes: a young Susan Hayward (that is, before she became, the First Lady of Screen Melodrama) as the perky small-town girl who entrances the crazy Dekker – which she’s all-too-willing to play up to, but who promptly and fiercely turns against him when he’s eventually revealed to be the cause of the terror which has gripped the community!; Harry Carey in the ambivalent role of the town doctor who, having been complicit in the cover-up of the mad brother’s existence, fears the repercussions of this act if he were to intervene when – at the satisfactorily frenzied climax – the good Dekker is accused of his brother’s crimes!; and the troubled Frances Farmer who, however, is wasted in the colorless role of the innocent sibling’s wife (in a virtual prerequisite of genre heroines, the actress is also asked to scream – which she does unconvincingly! – in her one scene with the mad Dekker).

The film is a Paramount production and, therefore, currently owned by Universal; while the latter have served their horror back-catalogue reasonably well on DVD, the equivalent stuff from that other studio has been consistently (and bafflingly) neglected over the years – especially since this includes such highly-desirable titles as ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), MURDERS IN THE ZOO (1933) and, now, AMONG THE LIVING itself...