TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:30 and 10 a.m. ET is Budd Boetticher’s The Killer is Loose (1956), with Joseph Cotten, Rhonda Fleming, Wendell Corey and Alan Hale Jr.

By David in TN
Saturday, May 14, 2022 at 12:04:00 A.M. EDT

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:30 and 10 a.m. ET is Budd Boetticher’s The Killer is Loose (1956), with Joseph Cotten, Rhonda Fleming, Wendell Corey and Alan Hale Jr.

Film Noir Guide: “Detective Cotten accidentally kills the wife of a psychopathic bank robber (Corey), who promises to get even. When he escapes from prison, Corey targets Cotten’s pregnant wife (Fleming). Hale plays a clumsy cop, a part that prepared him for his best known role—that of a clumsy sea captain in TV’s Gilligan’s Island. The acting is terrible, and the usually reliable Cotten and Corey are disappointing.”

David in TN: Not exactly a glowing recommendation. Budd Boetticher is best known for directing several of Randolph Scott’s best Western films and two of Audie Murphy’s.

N.S.: During the 1940s, Joseph Cotten—possibly the greatest American actor never nominated for an Oscar—made one masterpiece or classic after another: Citizen Kane (1941); Shadow of a Doubt (1943); Since You Went Away (1944); Gaslight (also 1944); Love Letters (1945); Duel in the Sun (1946); The Farmer’s Daughter (1947); Portrait of Jennie (1948); and The Third Man (1949). (You know what? I had always thought of Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant as the dominant actors of the 1940s, but I may need to revise that judgment.)

However, the 1950s were not so kind to Cotten.

Members of the Orson Welles Cult will tell you that The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) was also a masterpiece that some evil demon at RKO deliberately butchered. However, I once saw it on TV late at night, and was underwhelmed. Not a single scene had the stuff of greatness. I suppose a Welles cultist would respond that the RKO devil worked with surgical precision. Well, I’ve seen John Huston’s The Red Badge of Courage (1951), starring Audie Murphy, twice. Badge was notoriously butchered by MGM, and runs only 69 minutes, B-movie length. And yet my second viewing, a couple of years ago, re-confirmed my impression of many years before: Every scene is a miniature masterpiece.

From imdb.com (without attribution):

“John Huston considered this his best film. After a power struggle at the top of MGM management, the film was cut from a two-hour epic to the 69-minute version released to theaters. It was never released as an ‘A’ feature but was shown as a second-feature ‘B’ picture. Both Huston and star Audie Murphy tried unsuccessfully to purchase the film so that it could be re-edited to its original length. The studio claimed that the cut footage was destroyed. Unless there is an undiscovered copy of the uncut version, this movie will never be viewed as Huston intended.”