Taut Mid-1950s Thriller Directed by Budd Boetticher: "The Killer is Loose" (1956)

Budd Boetticher has a reputation (advanced by Andrew Sarris in particular) as an auteur who made B-westerns in great number during the late-1950s starring Randolph Scott (including The Tall T, Seven Men from Now, Decision at Sundown, Buchanan Rides Alone, Ride Lonesome,Comanche Station). The 1956 police/psycho duel "The Killer Is Loose" that he directed just before the Scott westerns was impressively taut, interestingly photographed, and prefigured "Psycho" in some ways. This is especially true in the mild-mannered killer of the title, played by Wendell Corey (around the time of his best films: Rear Window, The Big Knife, The Rainmaker).

Corey plays Leon Poole, a bespectacled veteran of the Korean War, where he was unmercifully taunted as "Foggy" by a fairly fascist sergeant named Otto, who just happens to show up in the bank as it is being robbed. Joseph Cotten (star of some of the best 1940s films, including The Magnificent Ambersons, Shadow of a Doubt, The Third Man) plays the police detective, Sam Wagner, who quickly figures out that Leon is the inside man on the bank robbery. When the police go to arrest Leon, they are told his wife is out, but in the dark they shoot him.

When Leon is convicted, he confronts Sam and his trophy wife Lila (Rhonda Fleming, who was in noirs such as "Out of the Past" and "While the City Sleeps") and promises revenge. Leon's idée fixe is "If my wife is killed, why should his live?" When Leon breaks out of prison (having made it to the "honor farm" for good behavior), everyone but Fleming knows his aim is to kill her. She believes the target is her husband and berates him for remaining a policeman, as if quitting the force would have altered Leon's thirst for revenge for the slaying of his wife, or for his arrest.

There is some offscreen violence and a memorable explosion of a milk bottle before the tense finale, which involves literally walking into danger, yet doesn't seem implausible as the climactic encounters of so many thrillers do!.

There is a message about not tormenting unmacho men, but the main theme is the duty of police wives to buck up and support their husbands.

Leon's premises are obviously wacko, but the film shows him proceeding logically within them. Corey is pretty much the show. Joseph Cotten phones in his part -- almost literally so: many of his lines are into a walkie-talkie. Fleming is good at domesticity and petty annoyance, then, at the realization of what is really going on, and, in the end, progresses well in dealing with the man who wants to kill her.

Most of the movie takes place during the day, though there are touches of 1950s cinema noir (and of Douglas Sirk's attention to 1950s household decor). The sometimes very stylish cinematography was done by Lucien Ballard (1908-88), who like Boetticher, has more of a reputation for shooting westerns (The Outlaw, Ride the High Country, The Wild Bunch, Will Penny, the first adaptation of True Grit, Junior Bonner), but began by working for Josef von Sternberg on "Morocco" in 1930, shot Laura for Otto Preminger, and "The Killing" for the young Stanley Kubrick.

The whole story of "The Killer Is Loose" is efficiently told in 73 minutes.