This is an unusual film in many ways, but most striking to me is that the director, Paul Sloane, a silent film auteur who had made the transition to sound and then inexplicably vanished from the industry for more than a decade, suddenly reappeared to write and direct what is essentially a silent movie (with conventional 1950-era sound), starring quite a cast of silent era actors.
Almost everything in this movie is antique -- the large cast of older men as reporters, the elderly "Pops" who runs the diner, the frozen-in-amber look of the sets for the warden's home and his office in the prison -- and this elegiac effect is heightened by the continual references to times gone by and the display of worn-out and bypassed items, such as the out-of-date Post Office "Wanted" posters that Pops has learned to love. Even the direction of the unknown young "Girl" is reminiscent of Murnau's direction of Janet Gaynor in 1927's "Sunrise."
If you look up the bios of the actors, you will see that at least half of them were over 50 and some were in their late 60s. Did Paul Sloane just come out of hibernation, hire all of his old colleagues and have one last go at it? I don' think we will ever know -- but for whatever reason he did it, the film is very satisfying if you think of it as a "silent film with sound."
I rated it an 8, which i rarely do for "B" films, because although it was filmed with minimal sets and although i tend to downgrade films that feature boyishly handsome priests called "Padre," (sorry, just a quirk of mine), this movie is unique, like a carton of mint-condition New-Old-Stock porcelain dolls found in the sealed-off back room of a diner on a sound stage somewhere in Post-War Los Angeles.
Don't be afraid to try it. Just love it for what it is.
Almost everything in this movie is antique -- the large cast of older men as reporters, the elderly "Pops" who runs the diner, the frozen-in-amber look of the sets for the warden's home and his office in the prison -- and this elegiac effect is heightened by the continual references to times gone by and the display of worn-out and bypassed items, such as the out-of-date Post Office "Wanted" posters that Pops has learned to love. Even the direction of the unknown young "Girl" is reminiscent of Murnau's direction of Janet Gaynor in 1927's "Sunrise."
If you look up the bios of the actors, you will see that at least half of them were over 50 and some were in their late 60s. Did Paul Sloane just come out of hibernation, hire all of his old colleagues and have one last go at it? I don' think we will ever know -- but for whatever reason he did it, the film is very satisfying if you think of it as a "silent film with sound."
I rated it an 8, which i rarely do for "B" films, because although it was filmed with minimal sets and although i tend to downgrade films that feature boyishly handsome priests called "Padre," (sorry, just a quirk of mine), this movie is unique, like a carton of mint-condition New-Old-Stock porcelain dolls found in the sealed-off back room of a diner on a sound stage somewhere in Post-War Los Angeles.
Don't be afraid to try it. Just love it for what it is.