By David in TN
Friday, October 26, 2018 at 12:25:00 A.M. EDT
TCM's Film Noir of the Week for Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12 a.m. ET (and 10 a.m. ET Sunday Morning) is Follow Me Quietly (1949), with William Lundigan and Dorothy Patrick. Lundigan and Patrick were usually supporting players but have the lead in this RKO B picture.
William Lundigan and Jeff Corey play detectives pursuing a “faceless,” psychopathic serial killer. Character actor Corey is best known for playing the despicable, self-pitying, white trash killer, Tom Chaney (and an alias), in True Grit (1969). Within the business, however, he was a legendary acting coach.
Richard Fleischer directed and, in his usual fashion, gets a lot of story in a 59-minute movie.
Detective Lundigan pursues a serial killer called "The Judge." Patrick is a girl reporter who pushes the detective to give her the story.
Follow Me Quietly is one of the first serial killer movies. Watch for an improbable, but hair-raising scene.
It has a good script by Lillie Hayward, off a story by Francis Rosenwald and Anthony Mann (Mann would become a top director in the 1950s, particularly noted for his Jimmy Stewart pictures), and some suspense, directed by Fleischer in an early effort.
3 comments:
Good movie!...Thanks for posting!
Jeff Corey was also a prominent (and unrepentant) Communist. One 50s actor said in an interview there were so many in Hollywood, you were shunned if you WEREN'T one!
TCM's Film Noir of the Week for Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 am ET (and 10 am ET Sunday Morning) is The Sniper (1952), with Adolphe Menjou, Arthur Franz, Marie Windsor, and Richard Kiley, directed By Edward Dmytryk.
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."
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.
Windsor is a victim. Kiley is a police psychiatrist who gives the motives.
Stanley Kramer produced and with Kramer, you know its 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.
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