ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

Yash Wade Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Logan By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

evanston_dad A stark and upsetting film about a serial sniper driven to shoot women because of suggested but never explicitly explained interactions with female figures in his past. There's something ahead of its time about this film, partially because of its frank mingling of violence and sexuality, but also because of the way it depicts what happens to a human body when it's gunned down. In other movies from the same time period, if someone were to get shot, they would freeze and pose dramatically for the camera before slowly crumpling to the floor in a bloodless swoon. In this film, shot bodies get thrown into walls and drop like lead. It's disturbing because it looks very real.Also notable is this film's plea to its audience to have sympathy with its tortured killer, and the suggestion that murderers might be sick rather than evil. The end shot in particular left me chilled and heartbroken at the same time.The story won screen writing couple Edward and Edna Anhalt their second Oscar nomination, though that year's winner was "The Greatest Show on Earth." Grade: A

museumofdave Decades ago, I used to hang out in San Francisco's North Beach at a little bar called the Paper Doll, long-gone. I thought I'd never see it again in any form and here it is used as a central murder location along with unusual shots of Chinatown, Telegraph Hill and Russian Hill, all gritty location shots for this tight little noir about a unhappy killer driven by a loathing of women; it's a fast-paced 88 minute "B" movie with some "A" credentials including an aging Adolphe Menjou, barely recognizable without mustache and a tux, and director Edward Dmytryk, both working with a script that rushes the viewer along with the ruthlessly driven dry-cleaner delivery man, unhappy with the world and with his sickness.Keeping in mind this was a low-budget film made quickly on-site with minimum studio interference, it's a riveting, if occasionally dated, thriller. A note: although set in San Francisco, the film goes out of its way NOT to identify the city, a fact pointed out in the casually excellent feature commentary by Eddie Muller, one of my personal faves.

zardoz-13 Before Edward Dmytryk made "Raintree County," he made a number of B-movie thrillers that stand out. "The Sniper" was one of the earliest examples of a serial killer movie. Edward Franz plays a troubled delivery man for a clothes cleaning service. He is driven to shoot women with a carbine. The irony is that the protagonist wants desperately to be captured by the police. Eddie keeps a carbine in his dresser drawer, and the police have launched a full-scale search. Despite being made in the early 1950s, this melodrama is pretty good with Franz turning in a compelling performance. Clocking in at 88 minutes, "The Sniper" is a crisp, sharp, suspense film that doesn't wear out its welcome. Moreover, "The Sniper" is a forerunner of Don Siegel's "Dirty Harry." Dmytryk and lenser Burnett Guffey make good use of actual on-location photography that gives this thriller a lot of atmosphere. The name of the cop assigned to bring Eddie in is Lieutenant Frank Kafka. Talk about an unusual name. In the finale, the cop storm Eddie's apartment house building, blast the door with a Thompson machine gun, and find the villain clutching his carbine with a tear rolling down his cheek.

cinephage In spite of the location shooting, this crime movie (certainly not a film noir) is nothing but typical, boring Stanley Kramer fare with some police procedures, a tendency of the times. It's nothing but a much too long lecture about the necessity of preventing crime by having more psychiatrists than cops and more insane asylum than prisons. It has badly aged and is quite uninteresting actually. THe characters are unbelievable, the cops as well as the preaching psychiatrist. I guess you might call it a liberal movie (though it was the Mc Carthy era) but if you're not a liberal, not a chance to be convinced by the message in the film. The idea is "criminals are human beings too and too often, society refuses to listen to them and our indifference to those suffering souls is the main cause of crime". Add to it that the crowd is cruel and insensitive (that old lady who says "I hope they'll kill him" among others) and the film was made from the point of view of the killer and its quite misogynistic : all women are horrible (he is thus to be forgiven if he kills them) especially Miller's boss. It was a strange idea to revive it on DVD as part of the Columbia Film Noir series (Movies were mostly non-noir except the very modern "Murder by contract" directed by Irving Lerner.