"Steckler looks the part..."
This fast-moving black/white thriller begins in Hollywood and ends, I assume, in hills and back roads somewhere near LA. It has some amazing cinematography (Joe Micelli) and action scenes. The cinematography alone makes this picture worth seeing. It's that good. The actors really had to work in some of this. Liz Renay is featured, and she has to run, sometimes barefoot, on dirt roads, brush and cliffs, trying to escape from one of three psychopaths after her. There's a great sequence in which Steckler on horseback is chased by a motorcycle cop. This is after another chase sequence through the hills in which he shoots up quite a few uniformed pursuers.
I've seen Renay before in "Date with Death" (1959), the noir with Gerald Mohr. In that one, she handled a substantial part smoothly and she does so again here. Her husband in the movie, Joseph Bardo, has two fights that are very realistically staged. The director, Ray Dennis Steckler, plays a homicidal maniac who hates people and shoots them with abandon. Steckler looks the part.
The movie begins by being about the movie business. There is a party at which people are joking about the bad acting they saw in some offbeat productions, and doing some pretty bad acting themselves. The film at this point doesn't take itself too seriously, but that changes. The movie becomes much more serious when the escaped psychos encounter a couple in the boondocks and later in a diner. Steckler is the brother of one of these.
Is this movie late noir or some sort of noir offshoot? Renay had just come out of prison for refusing to testify against her boy friend, Mickey Cohen. Does that score some noir points? Author Mike Quarles says "the film often has a film noir look". Well, maybe late noir. The plot is certainly dark enough, as fate brings innocent people face to face with forces they never imagined would confront them. Noir? Yes, if you are willing to cut the 60s some slack and let its films make their own space. No, if you are looking for well-worn noir themes.
This is not a film with a focus on character. It's much less subtle than that and much more into action.
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