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I wasn't even alive before her
I will always concur with the characterization of noir as anxious cinema, but there's anxiety and then there are movies you just want to hand a frozen orange and give them the rest of the night off. Budd Boetticher's The Killer Is Loose (1956) is an unnerved little picture. It's tied up in domestic knots, still jangling from the war, and packed full of gender trouble I hadn't thought would detonate on American screens until the next decade. About the only thing that doesn't have it worried is the bomb, but it doesn't make that much difference; for its title character, the end of the world's been and gone.
Suburban noir by 1956 was a regular flavor, but the bank windows of a small building and loan office in downtown Los Angeles set such a blandly commercial scene that the time-tabled, vérité-clocked signals of the men about to knock it over feel like a thesis statement, just as the tabloid scream of the title and the ominous, allegorical figure casting its cowl of shadow behind the credits anticipate a killer as recognizable as an angel of death, which the film will withhold in favor of something more oblique, laconic, upsetting. If we believe his old sergeant who recognizes him behind the teller's counter with the jocular punching down of their days in the South Pacific, Leon Poole (Wendell Corey) not only wouldn't hurt a fly, he'd lose his rifle first, trip over his own feet, the bottle-bottom slabs of his glasses justifying the humiliating nickname of "Corporal Foggy, the Jungle Killer." The heroism of the pistol-whipping he takes for charging one of the robbers in the split second of the heist is short-lived in its verisimilitude when he betrays himself as the inside man on a tapped line down which his confederate furiously hisses, "Hang up, you stupid!" Barricaded into his walk-up garden apartment, he's pegged as a "scared amateur" who choked at the sight of police, but there's nothing second-rate about Poole gathering into his arms the slender toppled silhouette that was his beloved Doris (Martha Crawford), cut down by irrevocable mistake as Lieutenant Sam Wagner of the LAPD (Joseph Cotten) crashed through the bolted, bullet-drilled door, the woman everyone had told him wasn't home dead before her husband had time to drop his gun. "Don't you see how wrong it was to do that? To kill her?" His eyes are trapped like tears inside their black horn-rims, lost a thousand yards. By the time of his sentencing, however, they have found a focus, and they remain fixed on her as if there is nothing else in the courtroom, not the regretful judge, not the ineffectual lawyer, not the mixed, pitying audience of cops and their wives or even her husband to whom he addresses the curiously conversational warning, "Someday, Wagner, I'm going to settle with you for it. I'm certainly going to settle with you for it." Three years later when he busts out of the state honor farm with a startling act of violence in the middle of a lettuce field, it takes far too many misses of roadblocks and dragnets for the state and municipal police to realize the truth: this nondescript, middle-aged, white-collar criminal with a store-stolen .357 Magnum isn't homing in on a cop-killing, not when he can exact a far more poignant turnabout on the detective who bereaved him of his wife. Life for life, grief for grief, Leon Poole wants Lila Wagner (Rhonda Fleming). "He'll still take you if he can't reach her. But, Sam, she's the number one target."
Closely fleshed out by Harold Medford from the 1953 novelette by John and Ward Hawkins, The Killer Is Loose could run its jitters on the mere ordinariness of Poole, such a soft-spoken epitome of the killer next door that it lands with accidental rimshot when the building manager, the night of the arrest, indignantly affirms the Pooles as "two of the nicest tenants we've ever had." He can't be seen coming to a degree that the film dramatizes ironically, the removal of his glasses—he can't squint to read a street sign without them—rendering him as invisible as an alter ego even when his mug shot has been circulated to the patrolmen who wave him on with the wrong driver's license, slapped across the papers consumed by oblivious passersby, the law-abiding and the law-enforcing alike fumbling in his bat-blind wake. "Don't you read the newspapers? Today's paper? Turn on your television set or listen to the radio?" Perhaps he learned his lessons better than his sergeant thought, or perhaps he just needed the right objective. A laughingstock of a soldier for Uncle Sam in the Pacific, on a home-front suicide mission he's a damn near commando, razor-focused and ruthless, improvising escape after subterfuge after murder with heartbroken, detached efficiency. It makes him frightening, especially when his resourcefulness includes the close-up nastiness of a hand-held throat-hacking, the hefting implications of a sickle, the arterial explosion of milk that caps a home invasion like a premonition of The Manchurian Candidate (1962). "What else could I do?" he asks the glass-splashed kitchen afterward, as blankly as if the woman in a dead faint beside her dead husband should answer his reasonable question. At the end of his quest is an innocent stranger who never did anything more to him than live. The audience may feel encouraged to agree with the general opinion of the LAPD, Sam included: "The guy's a psycho!" And yet Poole can't be as easily othered as all that. He has no diagnoses, no delusions, no history of violence beyond his undistinguished, perhaps not even active service in WWII; despite his pained recollections of ridicule as far back as childhood, he doesn't play like his fermenting insecurities finally cracked like a cluster bomb. He plays like grief-shock, so total and deranging that in three years it hasn't scarred over, hasn't even taken the raw edge off the dreaming, disbelieving tone in which he speaks of his wife whether he's kneeling beside her body or recalling her over the barrel of a revolver, as if she's still warm in his arms, her eyes just closing, as if he could describe her back to life. "She never laughed at me . . . You don't know how important that was. It was the difference between being dead and being alive. I loved her more than anything in the world. More than life. Much more." It touches and chills at once; even more than the scare of a psycho killer in the most mild-mannered of skins, Poole is a memento mori, a bleak, inescapable invitation to imagine the heart-stopping loss of the people who love us for our awkward, inglorious selves, without whom we might spin so far out of our own lives that we might as well have died with them. He has suffered the bereavement that Lila only fears, preparing to leave her husband mid-crisis, pregnant with their long-awaited child, rather than endure another day of waiting to lose him in the line of duty. Does it make her more neurotic, or him more normal? It binds them as surely as the KTTV coverage of the manhunt which plays in both the house where Lila has been stashed for her own protection and the house which Poole has commandeered for his, a real-time gambit on Sam's part which pays off in a tour-de-force of security theater, the walkie-talkie chatter of staked-out surveillance reduced to helpless spectatorship as killer and quarry converge on the same streetlit lawn. Even then, as the click of heels and the cock of triggers count down the last seconds until Lila, the radium dial of her rain-strung red hair reflecting in the wet-leaved suburban dark, takes the deliberate, nightmare turn down her own street while close behind her treads the uncanny object of Leon Poole, his telltale glasses shining like headlights inside the hood of a woman's raincoat, bare-legged in her white boots like some avenging amalgam of himself and his dead wife, we don't actually want to see him crumpled in a hail of gunfire any more than we want to watch him kill Lila instead. Hellbent and grotesque, he stands apart from the other screen killers of his decade who punctured the American dream with their reminders that a car, a bar, a house call were nowhere safe. He couldn't just happen to us; he could be us. Stalker-slasher prototype of Hitchcock and De Palma that he may be, Poole remains too close—in all senses—to home.
The best compliment I may be able to pay The Killer Is Loose is not that Corey is nigh unrecognizable playing a man without a wry bone in his body, but that it took me three months to realize that Doris is a woman in the refrigerator, because the vividness of loss she represents is so three-dimensional that she feels as present as Lila or Sam; this movie can sometimes be heard grinding between the psychotic and the procedural, but whenever it gets its grief in gear, it goes like the proverbial son-of-a-bitch. It is clever of it to leave the motivation for Poole's original turn toward crime unspoken except in the contrast of their two-room apartment with the new-construction houses of the Wagners or the Gillespies (Michael Pate and Virginia Christine) or the loan-assisted Otto and Grace Flanders (John Larch and Dee J. Thompson), but it's even subtler that it lets almost nothing but the acting suggest the guilt that Poole can never admit to himself, that like many a noir shlimazl before him he took a fatal short cut in his desperation to be a good provider and has been left paying more than he would ever have gained. "She didn't know about it, the hold-up. Not till tonight . . . Even after I told her, she still wanted to go with me." Even at his most disturbing, which is the scene in the kitchen, unshaven, filthy-shirted, fraying with fatigue as he hears his hated nickname again and the heavy short revolver wavers in his hand, he never quite completes the full heel turn, which cannot save him, but impresses me. It is a small but careful cruelty of the universe that the courtroom confronting the bereaved Poole seems suddenly full of couples, as the night bus that Lila catches from the corner in front of the liquor store contains too many anonymous, bespectacled men. The cinematography by Lucien Ballard slips effortlessly from the day-flat to the night-spiked and the whole feature runs 73 minutes, in case you have another panic attack to get to. TCM ran it for Rhonda Fleming as part of their Summer Under the Stars, but it plays without too much static on the Internet Archive. The more movies I see from this decade, the more I don't know how the myth of the white picket fence ever formed at all. This target brought to you by my number one backers at Patreon.
Suburban noir by 1956 was a regular flavor, but the bank windows of a small building and loan office in downtown Los Angeles set such a blandly commercial scene that the time-tabled, vérité-clocked signals of the men about to knock it over feel like a thesis statement, just as the tabloid scream of the title and the ominous, allegorical figure casting its cowl of shadow behind the credits anticipate a killer as recognizable as an angel of death, which the film will withhold in favor of something more oblique, laconic, upsetting. If we believe his old sergeant who recognizes him behind the teller's counter with the jocular punching down of their days in the South Pacific, Leon Poole (Wendell Corey) not only wouldn't hurt a fly, he'd lose his rifle first, trip over his own feet, the bottle-bottom slabs of his glasses justifying the humiliating nickname of "Corporal Foggy, the Jungle Killer." The heroism of the pistol-whipping he takes for charging one of the robbers in the split second of the heist is short-lived in its verisimilitude when he betrays himself as the inside man on a tapped line down which his confederate furiously hisses, "Hang up, you stupid!" Barricaded into his walk-up garden apartment, he's pegged as a "scared amateur" who choked at the sight of police, but there's nothing second-rate about Poole gathering into his arms the slender toppled silhouette that was his beloved Doris (Martha Crawford), cut down by irrevocable mistake as Lieutenant Sam Wagner of the LAPD (Joseph Cotten) crashed through the bolted, bullet-drilled door, the woman everyone had told him wasn't home dead before her husband had time to drop his gun. "Don't you see how wrong it was to do that? To kill her?" His eyes are trapped like tears inside their black horn-rims, lost a thousand yards. By the time of his sentencing, however, they have found a focus, and they remain fixed on her as if there is nothing else in the courtroom, not the regretful judge, not the ineffectual lawyer, not the mixed, pitying audience of cops and their wives or even her husband to whom he addresses the curiously conversational warning, "Someday, Wagner, I'm going to settle with you for it. I'm certainly going to settle with you for it." Three years later when he busts out of the state honor farm with a startling act of violence in the middle of a lettuce field, it takes far too many misses of roadblocks and dragnets for the state and municipal police to realize the truth: this nondescript, middle-aged, white-collar criminal with a store-stolen .357 Magnum isn't homing in on a cop-killing, not when he can exact a far more poignant turnabout on the detective who bereaved him of his wife. Life for life, grief for grief, Leon Poole wants Lila Wagner (Rhonda Fleming). "He'll still take you if he can't reach her. But, Sam, she's the number one target."
Closely fleshed out by Harold Medford from the 1953 novelette by John and Ward Hawkins, The Killer Is Loose could run its jitters on the mere ordinariness of Poole, such a soft-spoken epitome of the killer next door that it lands with accidental rimshot when the building manager, the night of the arrest, indignantly affirms the Pooles as "two of the nicest tenants we've ever had." He can't be seen coming to a degree that the film dramatizes ironically, the removal of his glasses—he can't squint to read a street sign without them—rendering him as invisible as an alter ego even when his mug shot has been circulated to the patrolmen who wave him on with the wrong driver's license, slapped across the papers consumed by oblivious passersby, the law-abiding and the law-enforcing alike fumbling in his bat-blind wake. "Don't you read the newspapers? Today's paper? Turn on your television set or listen to the radio?" Perhaps he learned his lessons better than his sergeant thought, or perhaps he just needed the right objective. A laughingstock of a soldier for Uncle Sam in the Pacific, on a home-front suicide mission he's a damn near commando, razor-focused and ruthless, improvising escape after subterfuge after murder with heartbroken, detached efficiency. It makes him frightening, especially when his resourcefulness includes the close-up nastiness of a hand-held throat-hacking, the hefting implications of a sickle, the arterial explosion of milk that caps a home invasion like a premonition of The Manchurian Candidate (1962). "What else could I do?" he asks the glass-splashed kitchen afterward, as blankly as if the woman in a dead faint beside her dead husband should answer his reasonable question. At the end of his quest is an innocent stranger who never did anything more to him than live. The audience may feel encouraged to agree with the general opinion of the LAPD, Sam included: "The guy's a psycho!" And yet Poole can't be as easily othered as all that. He has no diagnoses, no delusions, no history of violence beyond his undistinguished, perhaps not even active service in WWII; despite his pained recollections of ridicule as far back as childhood, he doesn't play like his fermenting insecurities finally cracked like a cluster bomb. He plays like grief-shock, so total and deranging that in three years it hasn't scarred over, hasn't even taken the raw edge off the dreaming, disbelieving tone in which he speaks of his wife whether he's kneeling beside her body or recalling her over the barrel of a revolver, as if she's still warm in his arms, her eyes just closing, as if he could describe her back to life. "She never laughed at me . . . You don't know how important that was. It was the difference between being dead and being alive. I loved her more than anything in the world. More than life. Much more." It touches and chills at once; even more than the scare of a psycho killer in the most mild-mannered of skins, Poole is a memento mori, a bleak, inescapable invitation to imagine the heart-stopping loss of the people who love us for our awkward, inglorious selves, without whom we might spin so far out of our own lives that we might as well have died with them. He has suffered the bereavement that Lila only fears, preparing to leave her husband mid-crisis, pregnant with their long-awaited child, rather than endure another day of waiting to lose him in the line of duty. Does it make her more neurotic, or him more normal? It binds them as surely as the KTTV coverage of the manhunt which plays in both the house where Lila has been stashed for her own protection and the house which Poole has commandeered for his, a real-time gambit on Sam's part which pays off in a tour-de-force of security theater, the walkie-talkie chatter of staked-out surveillance reduced to helpless spectatorship as killer and quarry converge on the same streetlit lawn. Even then, as the click of heels and the cock of triggers count down the last seconds until Lila, the radium dial of her rain-strung red hair reflecting in the wet-leaved suburban dark, takes the deliberate, nightmare turn down her own street while close behind her treads the uncanny object of Leon Poole, his telltale glasses shining like headlights inside the hood of a woman's raincoat, bare-legged in her white boots like some avenging amalgam of himself and his dead wife, we don't actually want to see him crumpled in a hail of gunfire any more than we want to watch him kill Lila instead. Hellbent and grotesque, he stands apart from the other screen killers of his decade who punctured the American dream with their reminders that a car, a bar, a house call were nowhere safe. He couldn't just happen to us; he could be us. Stalker-slasher prototype of Hitchcock and De Palma that he may be, Poole remains too close—in all senses—to home.
The best compliment I may be able to pay The Killer Is Loose is not that Corey is nigh unrecognizable playing a man without a wry bone in his body, but that it took me three months to realize that Doris is a woman in the refrigerator, because the vividness of loss she represents is so three-dimensional that she feels as present as Lila or Sam; this movie can sometimes be heard grinding between the psychotic and the procedural, but whenever it gets its grief in gear, it goes like the proverbial son-of-a-bitch. It is clever of it to leave the motivation for Poole's original turn toward crime unspoken except in the contrast of their two-room apartment with the new-construction houses of the Wagners or the Gillespies (Michael Pate and Virginia Christine) or the loan-assisted Otto and Grace Flanders (John Larch and Dee J. Thompson), but it's even subtler that it lets almost nothing but the acting suggest the guilt that Poole can never admit to himself, that like many a noir shlimazl before him he took a fatal short cut in his desperation to be a good provider and has been left paying more than he would ever have gained. "She didn't know about it, the hold-up. Not till tonight . . . Even after I told her, she still wanted to go with me." Even at his most disturbing, which is the scene in the kitchen, unshaven, filthy-shirted, fraying with fatigue as he hears his hated nickname again and the heavy short revolver wavers in his hand, he never quite completes the full heel turn, which cannot save him, but impresses me. It is a small but careful cruelty of the universe that the courtroom confronting the bereaved Poole seems suddenly full of couples, as the night bus that Lila catches from the corner in front of the liquor store contains too many anonymous, bespectacled men. The cinematography by Lucien Ballard slips effortlessly from the day-flat to the night-spiked and the whole feature runs 73 minutes, in case you have another panic attack to get to. TCM ran it for Rhonda Fleming as part of their Summer Under the Stars, but it plays without too much static on the Internet Archive. The more movies I see from this decade, the more I don't know how the myth of the white picket fence ever formed at all. This target brought to you by my number one backers at Patreon.
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Thank you! The AFI Catalog claims the original choice for Leon Poole was Orson Welles when Twentieth Century–Fox had the rights. I have no idea what happened that it ended up independent with Corey, but I am definitely not complaining.
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It's a grounding technique: I got it from
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So long as it works!
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Thank you so much! I'm really glad you enjoy them.
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I did end up listening to both of them last fall! I'm so glad you enjoyed it with Diana Rigg. I remember some of their line readings especially in the final scene. It was not a play I had ever seen before hearing it last year; I still haven't. Fortunately, you can hit someone across the face really successfully in audio.
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Fortunately, you can hit someone across the face really successfully in audio.
You really, really can! I was so impressed, lol.
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Your telling of it was giving me strong Breonna Taylor vibes--blind shooting that kills the wrong person. (I mean, in theory they shouldn't want to kill the suspect either, but that's so pie-in-the-sky it barely bears mentioning.)
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Especially over this past year, they have become invaluable both for finding and pointing to movies. I should probably tell them. I really appreciate it.
Your telling of it was giving me strong Breonna Taylor vibes--blind shooting that kills the wrong person. (I mean, in theory they shouldn't want to kill the suspect either, but that's so pie-in-the-sky it barely bears mentioning.)
It is a kind of death by police that has not dated at all in the last seven decades, which is perhaps more horrible than the suburban killer angle. I had read the original novelette and it still shocked me. After I had finished writing this review, I found it unexpectedly and extra-diegetically reassuring to run across this story from Martha Crawford about how she and Wendell Corey were corpsing throughout the entire stricken scene of Poole cradling his just-shot wife because she kept slithering out of his arms. (It doesn't show at all.)
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