TCM's Film Noir of the Week for Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 a.m. ET (and 10 a.m. ET Sunday Morning) is Edward Dmytryk’s Classic Serial Killer Story, The Sniper (1952), with Adolphe Menjou, Arthur Franz, Marie Windsor and Richard Kiley, and Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou as Accomplices

 

 

By David in TN
Thursday, November 1, 2018 at 10:37:00 PM EDT

TCM's Film Noir of the Week for Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 a.m. ET (and 10 a.m. ET Sunday Morning) is The Sniper (1952), with Adolphe Menjou, Arthur Franz, Marie Windsor and Richard Kiley, directed By Edward Dmytryk.
 

Eduard Franz and Marie Windsor 

The Sniper is the first well-known serial killer movie. It is notable for peddling the theory that murderers are “sick,” rather than “evil.” This film started the “stop me before I kill again” trope. It means with the right treatment, killers can be cured beforehand, or afterward they can be “reformed.”
 

Adolphe Menjou 

In other words, killers are “driven” to do it by forces they can't control.
 

 

Franz plays a psycho who hates women and is shooting them down on the streets of San Francisco. Menjou is the police detective hunting him. Gerald Mohr, a poor man's Bogart, plays Menjou’s younger, hipper colleague. This kind of pair became standard in cop stories (See Quinn Martin’s hit 1970s’ TV series, The Streets of San Francisco, starring the great Karl Malden, and a young Michael Douglas.)
 

 

Windsor is a victim. Kiley is a police psychiatrist who gives the motives.
 

 

Stanley Kramer produced, and with Kramer, you know it’s a “message picture.” Watch for our host Eddie Muller to wax and wane on the pairing of Edward Dmytryk as director and Adolphe Menjou as the star. Menjou named every Communist he knew, and Dmytryk was one of the named.
 

 

Eddie thinks any inconvenience to Hollywood Communists is the worst thing that ever happened.
 

 

 

N.S.: The Writers Guild of America (WGA), used to give out “The Robert Meltzer Award (Screenplay Dealing Most Ably with Problems of the American Scene).” The ‘Message Picture Award.’ The award was only given out from 1949-1952, but Stanley Kramer-produced pictures (Home of the Brave, The Men, and Death of a Salesman, used to contend for it every year.
 

A youngish Fritz Lang 

The idea for The Sniper surely came from Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou. Lang was the greatest director in the history of German pictures; Von Harbou was his second wife, and co-authored the screenplay of each of his German-language films, though I suspect that she was the dominant figure regarding their scripts. (E.g., Metropolis, the greatest science fiction movie ever made, was based on von Harbou’s eponymous novel.)
 

Thea von Harbou 

In 1931, when Lang and von Harbou made their first talkie, it was M - Eine Stadt sucht einen Mörder (M – A City Seeks a Murderer.

Peter Lorre starred as a serial killer of small children. Lang and von Harbou had spent months researching the new phenomenon of serial killers, which were called “Triebmörder” (“compulsion murderers”), particularly focusing on a couple of notorious recent cases, of whom the Lorre character was a composite.

Unfortunately, the ending of M, when a judicial tribunal issues the killer its sentence, has been lost (unless the screenplay can be found), but there is little doubt that Lang and von Harbou supported the therapeutic option. When you define serial killers as compelled to do what they do, you’re bound to oppose justice for their victims.
 

Lang and von Harbou at home, working