THE PRETENDER (1947)

Billy’s slightly older brother, W. Lee Wilder, directed this sixty-nine minute B-movie noir for Republic Pictures, which may be best remembered as one of the earliest Hollywood films to use a theremin, by Dr. Samuel J. Hoffman, to good effect and for John Alton's wonderfully dark, moody cinematography. The screenplay was written by Don Martin and Doris Miller who also provided additional dialogue. I found the script lacking clarity with some characters confusingly intertwined. It is quite possible I dozed off. Somewhat cleverly adding to the confusion, a key character changes his name after the halfway point. Quite perplexing for the leading man, Albert Dekker. For the era, I imagine this was a good suspenseful drama. Had it been released years later, it would have been more efficient—and free—as an episode of, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

Dekker had an inherent vocal ability to softly signify an unstable mind. At first, suggesting a reserved man, his real character here eventually comes to a breaking point. This role works for him. He plays a crooked investor, desperately embezzling money from a large estate bequeathed to the young Catherine Craig after her father’s death. Dekker is losing his shirt in the stock market and acting as a Robin Hood broker has been stealing from the rich and giving to himself. He is fortunate to have a secretary with zero scruples. She witnesses all his dishonest fund transfers without so much as a blink.

Typical of Hollywood's Golden Era, Dekker is old enough to be Craig’s uncle but he pours on the charm in his effort to woo her into marriage, giving him the ability to cover his debts with her inheritance. He even peels off his studio mustache to look younger. To himself. He has been a faithful and trusted friend regarding the estate, but she loves another in her age group. Dekker is not sure who that is but wants him killed, paying a nightclub owner/mobster, Alan Carney, to arrange an “accident” after their engagement picture appears in the newspaper. The lucky guy is Charles Drake, a neurosurgeon and doctor of psychology, whose responsibilities have left little time for Craig. They mutually call off their engagement. To Dekker’s surprise and queasiness, she decides to accept “Uncle Albert’s” earlier proposal and wants to elope. And the local paper knows about it.

In the meantime, Carney is killed and his right-hand man, Tom “Fingers” Kennedy, takes over the boss’s chair and decides to go upscale and use, I assume, his given character name. A name Dekker does not recognize but his paranoia tells him that anyone named “Fingers” would carry out the prepaid deed on him. Making it more difficult to trace, Carney, for anonymity, had bestowed upon Dekker’s character an alias, unknown to Kennedy. Throughout the balance of the film, the doomed groom is trying to make connections with Kennedy to cancel his prearranged funeral.

Dekker’s mental state is personified by the theremin. As the camera closes in on his face, now with a full mustache, he audibly shares his inner thoughts. Until the science fiction community confiscated the instrument, it was the perfect instrument to signify someone with psychological issues. His constant excuses and lies only go so far. He is afraid to eat for fear of poisoning. He does not trust their butler. Nor their second one. His paranoia increases to a ridiculous level while Craig becomes the most understanding woman on the planet. She gets Drake's free analysis and finds Dekker riddled with guilt and fear. They also find he has been dining alone in his room, eating canned food all along. Pretty creepy in the Dekker tradition. He dons sunglasses, even at night, for fear of being recognized. All his paranoia may be hard to sit through. Turns out, Carney left a note for Kennedy about canceling the groom’s elimination. One doubts that Dekker’s secretary will ever come forward about Craig’s monetary shortfall.

MAN IN THE DARK (1953)

Edmond O’Brien is serving a ten-year prison sentence for his early B-movies...I mean...armed robbery. He is offered immediate parole if he is willing to undergo experimental brain surgery to remove his criminal impulses. Sounds like the government's liberal pipe dream to abolish jails so we can all live happily together. It will also remove his memory. Not surprisingly, O’Brien impulsively is set on punching somebody in the jaw before surgery but finds serendipity in painting post-surgery. Ballet could not be worked into his rehab schedule. An insurance investigator, needing to recover the stolen money, thinks O’Brien is faking and tracks his every move. Likewise, Ted de Corsia is not buying his former partner's amnesia story. Stereo-typically, under his angled fedora, he is his usual gangster self, grumbling and angrily threatening to beat the truth out of him or burn an eye out with the lit end of a cigar. The latter used as a gruesome 3D stinger.

After twenty minutes, the first of two flashbacks occur as one gang member retells exactly, second by second, word for word, what happened during the robbery. One might accept this if it was O’Brien’s flashback. How he knew about O’Brien’s attempt to make a call from a phone booth after the heist is a mystery. What follows is a pursuit by two officers because O’Brien looks pretty guilty running down the sidewalk. In his early films, O'Brien was quite the runner. Really laying those dress shoes down. His stunt double climbs up a three-story fire escape followed by a silly implausibility: O’Brien drops a potted plant down in the officer’s vicinity in Merry Melodies cartoon fashion. A big clue as to his location. A clichéd chase on rooftops ensues as the frantic music score backs up the action. After a lot of running, O’Brien is not only exhausted but arrested on a painter’s scaffolding.

Audrey Totter is O’Brien’s girl but he does not know it. His recurring dreams, however, suggest she may be more than a stranger. One dream concerns a Santa Monica amusement park with a creepy seven-foot-tall laughing animatronic charwoman that is hard for O'Brien to forget. The following may answer why it is laughing so hard. The most humorous scene, and no doubt a highlight of the 3D processing, has O’Brien getting on The Whip car ride where individual pods rotate around an oval hub. The cars never stay in one position for any length of time, yet five police officers slip into their own car and “chase” O’Brien around the oval, never getting any closer. The officers shoot at him as their pod randomly twirls around. It is lucky a fellow officer was not wounded or a patron failed to dodge the stray bullets. The officer’s training never included this! Understandably, they cannot hit the broadside of a barn. The ride stops and all six orderly get out of their pods. 

O’Brien’s dreams come to life as he and Totter return to the amusement park. He knows where the money is hidden and with a dose of returning greed stuffs the cash inside his suit coat pockets. Perhaps that brain surgery did not work. Her disappointment shows and assumes he has reverted to his old ways. They go their separate ways. Later, the oft-used rear projection roller coaster ride is used with actors pretending their necks are being snapped back and forth. I imagine a real buzz in 3D. O’Brien gets off the coaster as it creeps to the top and climbs down the wooden structure to evade de Corsia, who stands up at the wrong end of the speeding coaster. A goon takes a final bow off the scaffolding after an officer’s bullet rings true. Give the officer a stuffed animal! Never far away, the insurance investigator arrives after bodies stop hitting the pavement and gets back the company’s one hundred thirty grand from O’Brien. The surgery really did work. He and Totter kiss as their roller-coaster relationship levels out.

Note: Directed by Lew Landers and produced by Wallace MacDonald, this was the first Columbia Pictures film released in 3D, all in glorious black and white. It is a remake of the 1936 film, The Man Who Lived Twice, with a premise that has been used over and over since. This seventy-minute B-movie offers up good pacing but the amnesia angle is pretty stale aside from the brain surgery concept. Decidedly more fantastic than John Payne’s war injury in the 1949 film, The Crooked Way.