Director: Budd Boetticher
Starring: Joseph Cotten, Rhonda Fleming, Wendell Corey
Release Date: 2nd March 1956 (US)
The 1950s, we are often told, were a time of stiff conformity and sterility; one only need look at The Onion’s hilarious book Our Dumb Century (1999), with its mock contemporary newspaper headlines warning of ‘gum in our schools’ or the national crisis of overdue library books, for an example of the Fifties stereotype of untroubled staidness. Yet no sooner had the decade passed, it became viewed as a golden era of stability and security, the Happy Days of TV fame, partly due to the speed of change in US society during the 1960s. Nostalgia is often our recourse in the face of that great unknown, tomorrow. Yet this duality of fear and comfort isn’t limited to retrospect. What if the people were as afraid of yesterday as they were of the future, how would that affect their ‘today’? What if the Fifties were both safe and frightening?
Reviewing The Killer is Loose for The New Yorker in 2013, critic Richard Brody commented “the genre was launched during the war and reflects the traumas that it immediately inflicted on American society. Those traumas reached deep and lasted long and…The Killer is Loose is fueled by them.” Tens of thousands of veterans walked the streets of America in 1956, including those of the more recent conflict in Korea; add to this the tense, ideological standoff against Communism, then those quiet suburban homes and picket-lined fences of folk memory transform into the hard, mean streets of the cinematic big city (“the city’s spreading out, isn’t it?” is a casual, but notable early remark). The haven of home and the hell of war are as real as each other, they co-exist just as we do with friends and strangers. Sometimes, a film reminds us that the stranger over there is actually ourselves, and the clerk at the bank with the handshake and the smile is the most broken man of all. The danger is, he’s the man who’s still lost in the fog of war, who can’t see, who can’t be shown a thing.
Somewhere in a large city, with long roads in every direction and easy credit in every window, men in suits signal to each other, orchestrating their movements to some undefined goal. Inside a saving and loans bank, a customer apologizes for an overdue payment. Not a problem, replies clerk Leon Poole (Wendell Corey), “it can happen to any of us.” Next in line is a man not recognized at first by Poole, Otto Flanders (John Larch), his former sergeant during the war in the Pacific. Flanders knows his one-time corporal at once – those thick bottle-bottomed spectacles are a giveaway. Soon, to the clerk’s discomfort, Flanders is regaling all and sundry with stories of “Corporal Foggy, the jungle killer,” a man even the native islanders mocked for his myopia and forgetfulness.
Meanwhile, over in a corner, a discreet but major robbery is taking place, two strange men emptying a safe with tantalizing audacity. The manager tries to raise the alarm, but no dice, all exits are covered, the gunmen suddenly everywhere. As the robbers leave with bags of money, Poole acts the hero, punching one of the men, but is soon beaten to the ground, and the thieves escape. Flanders tells Poole he’s changed his mind regarding his old corporal.
The police arrive, headed by Detective Sam Wagner (Joseph Cotten), who questions the staff in the bank manager’s office. We learn Wagner is recently married, while Poole and his wife, Doris, have been together for five years. Wagner mentions how his wife worries about his line of work. “My wife still worries about me,” replies Poole. “I kind of like it.” The police deduce the robbers knew an awful lot about the bank, its staff and schedules, and so set about monitoring the home phone calls of its workers. Sure enough, we learn the robbery was an inside job when Poole receives an incriminating call from one of his cohorts (it isn’t stated in the film, but it’s possible the call is from the thief Poole attacked, getting his revenge for the unplanned assault, meaning it’s Poole’s bravado for the benefit of his sergeant that gets him into all the trouble which follows).
The police surround the apartment block where the Pooles live. Their landlady (Martha Wentworth) tells Wagner the Pooles “are two of the nicest tenants we’ve ever had,” (a stone’s throw from ‘they kept themselves to themselves” in the lexicon of the landlady) and that Mrs Poole left the apartment some time ago. Fired at through the Poole’s door, Wagner and colleagues storm the apartment, the detective shooting a figure in the shadows. The lights go up; Poole is standing in the corner, armed but unharmed, while Mrs Poole has left the apartment, but in a more metaphysical sense. Poole, shattered, gives up his gun and lays his dead wife out on their bed. Wagner tries to explain, but it’s too late. “I wasn’t even alive before her,” says Poole to Wagner. “Don’t you see how wrong it was to do that?” The smiling, polite clerk has died, in a different sense than his wife, for the man did not exist in the first place; this is the real Leon Poole, isolated and thus uncovered.
At court, the judge acknowledges Poole’s loss, but sentences him to ten years in prison. Poole stares at Wagner’s wife Lila (Rhonda Fleming) and quietly vows vengeance to the detective. The wife of Wagner’s colleague Chris Gillespie, Mary (Virginia Christine), comforts Lila, telling her she too will become “numb” to threats made to a policeman husband.
Two and a half years later, and the prison governor awards Poole a place at the honor farm for good behavior. Poole mumbles he just followed the rules. At the farm, Poole is volunteered to help unload a truckload of vegetables once it reaches town. Not long after Poole and the guard (Stanley Adams) drive off, Poole rips out the guard’s throat with a loosened off hoe blade, permanently interrupting the guard’s discourse on lettuce. Poole takes control of the truck, dumps the guard’s body into an irrigation dyke and drives to a nearby farm where, pausing to pat a dog on the head, he knocks on the door, holding a scythe in his other hand…
Late at night Detective Wagner receives a phone call regarding an escaped prisoner and Lila doesn’t need to guess the name of the man on the lam. Wagner tries to reassure Lila, but instead the pair go through their same old argument about the dangers of police work. “Yeah, I know,” says Wagner. “You don’t want to be a cop’s widow. If I loved you as much as you loved me…” The stakes for the couple are high; Lila is pregnant (in 1956, pregnancy could be only be hinted at indirectly, as here; also we see the movie convention of a married couple sleeping in separate single beds), and believes Poole is after Sam, but her husband maintains it’s unreasonable of Lila to expect him to give up police work. Lila’s unease isn’t helped when two plain clothes cops (including – hey! It’s the Skipper from Gilligan’s Island!) arrive to protect Lila in Wagner’s absence.
Wagner, “the target’s target,” attends a remarkably detailed slideshow of Poole’s facial features, with great emphasis placed on Poole’s trademark spectacles. It’s easy to forget, but wearing glasses was once distinctive; I first wore spectacles as a kid in the early 1980s, the only person in my school class to do so, and no-one aside from Poole wears glasses in The Killer is Loose. As a young-ish man during the Forties and Fifties, it’s not unlikely that Poole felt stigmatized for his poor eyesight, and certainly Sgt. Flanders made fun of ‘Foggy’ as a result. Anyhow, the cops at the roadblock Poole breezes through either need glasses or didn’t get to see the slideshow, as the convict evades capture by using the dead farmer’s clothes and driving license. Poole isn’t wearing his glasses as part of the ‘disguise’ (which here involves removing, rather than adding, a personal effect), and almost crashes his truck into a police car.
There’s consternation at police HQ, but that’s what happens when you put Chief O’Hara from Batman (Stafford Repp, who we saw in 1957’s Plunder Road) in charge of the operation. Detectives have visited the prison where Poole was incarcerated, with the governor describing him as “the world’s most perfect prisoner,” while Poole’s former cellmate, an unseen character who nonetheless ranks as one of the most wretched in cinema, spoke of how Poole chewed his ear off over his dead, divine wife at every opportunity. “Poole wanted to know why, as you had killed his wife, your wife should be alive.” Wagner realizes he has underestimated Poole, but remains confident he’ll get caught in the police dragnet; after all, Poole has no friends he can call upon. Wagner decides they should put ought a false story to the media about the police cornering Poole, as part of a plot to use himself as bait to lure the criminal into a trap. To do this, Wagner gives a false story to Lila about going on vacation, mirroring Poole’s own actions to Doris during his attempt to flee town after the tapped phone call.
Poole, it transpires, doesn’t need friends; he has enemies. Wandering in the rain, using his glasses only when necessary, Poole finds his way to the Flanders’ home. Otto is out, and Mrs Flanders allows Poole in as a friend of her husband, but soon realizes he is the escaped prisoner of the TV reports. In an unsettling scene, Poole reluctantly menaces the sobbing Mrs Flanders (Dee J Thompson), just by sitting at a kitchen table and using his normal speaking voice. When the petrified woman tries to flee, Poole gently lays a hand on her arm, saying “please don’t do that. I’m asking you, please don’t try to do that again. Or I’ll have to kill you.” Throughout, Wendell Corey plays Poole with an air of apology, a pathetic psychopath annoyed at how life throws things in his way when he has a simple, reasonable job to do.
The Wagners arrive at the home of the Gillespies, and not at the beach, but Lila knows her husband has been lying. Sam tells her about his trap to capture Poole. “Very noble,” says Lila, “but I don’t like it,” and issues an ultimatum: the beach, or the divorce court. “What sort of husband do you want?” asks Sam. “One who’ll let someone else lay their life on the line so he can play it safe?” Safe is a word the two disagree upon, the term more flexible for Sam, whereas for Lila, safety is the absence of all possible threats and worries, but the film repeatedly makes the point that nowhere is safe from violence, or the threat of violence, as Lila hopes. “I loved you more than I should have,” she tells him. All Sam can do is give his wife a dry peck on the cheek before he leaves.
Otto Flanders arrives home just as the TV reports Poole as ‘cornered’ in his apartment. On meeting Poole, Otto addresses him as ‘Foggy’, leading Poole into a painful reverie regarding his late wife, who accepted Poole, for all his faults. Mrs Poole never laughed at her husband, to whom she was “the difference between being dead and alive…I loved her more than life.” This makes for an interesting contrast with the previous scene, where it appears that Lila is unable to contemplate life without her husband, and is unsure whether the feeling is mutual. Poole is in the traditionally more feminine role of dependence, but is living out what Lila merely fears.
Drinking from a bottle of milk, Otto appeals to Poole. “Can’t you see what you’re up against?” he asks, adding it would be easy for him to disarm or disable Poole during any momentary distraction, an event both know must happen sooner or later. Yet Otto has talked himself into a dead end and with a look of distaste and bafflement, Poole shoots Otto, who dies in a shower of milk and a clattering of kitchen pots and pans. Mrs Flanders faints, and Poole picks up her handbag and coat. “What else could I do?” he mutters, deadened by his own pathological logic.
Lila is packing her bags, ready to leave the Gillespie’s and her marriage. Mary confronts her with the truth: Poole isn’t after Sam, he’s after Lila, and Sam has placed himself in Poole’s sights to protect his wife. Lila is shocked, but Mary tells her “I think you had it coming,” for believing she alone should live free from fear. Devastated by the risk Sam is willing to take for her to spare her worry, and with her friend’s brusque honesty, Lila views her relationships more clearly, but is now more concerned than ever.
Meanwhile, the police are engaged in intensive monitoring of the Wagner’s house and its locale, with every pedestrian who happens by under scrutiny. Lila, determined to join her husband, catches a bus, full of men ‘disguised’ with hats, glasses and raincoats, and like the police, she suspects everyone. Gillespie contacts Wagner, telling her Lila is likely making her way home, just as Poole is doing. In a neat subversion, a hot-rodding teen almost collides with a woman in a sedan, but the teen is innocent and, unknown to the police, the ‘woman’ is actually Poole wearing Mrs Flander’s clothes; his emasculation is complete. The increasing tension masks some of the plot’s deficiencies, as we are asked to believe Poole can evade the police stakeout simply by dodging behind a hedgerow, but the movie pulls us along with it, not so much glossing over the holes but tearing through them in the rush to the conclusion.
Detective Gillespie and his comrades are stymied as they relay information and speculation to Wagner, waiting at home. Is the strange woman really Poole? Should they shoot what may be an innocent woman, or attempt an arrest (when, if it were Poole, he’d surely shoot the woman he suspects is Lila)? Will Lila turn away from home (if not, then surely Poole will know this is Lila and kill her)? “You call it,” Gillespie tells Wagner. “She’s got to pass by,” says the sweating Wagner, “I know she will.” Such is the uncertainty, the viewer isn’t even sure that Poole knows he’s following Lila, or if Lila is aware of Poole, until the last possible moment, when all hell breaks loose…
After the complex plotting of 1940s film noir, the 1950s saw the genre move towards concision over lyricism. Director Budd Boetticher instead concentrates on tight cuts and sharpening atmosphere, part of noir’s movement toward straightforward suspense which eventually divided the genre into procedural films and psychological horror. For the latter, as more than one critic has noted, the cross-dressing Poole, a quiet but disturbed man who determines to kill a woman out of sick vengeance, prefigures Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) by four years. Psycho brought to the fore what the film viewer could not previously see, the motivations of a psychopath, even to the point of sympathy. The character of Leon Poole, a man who sees too much through spectacles, and not enough without them, is a step towards the painfully sensitive, and yet insensitive, Norman Bates; compare Poole’s almost emotionless reaction to his wife’s death to Bates’ reaction to incarceration at the conclusion of Psycho. Unlike Hitchcock’s classic, the title of the The Killer is Loose is ambiguous, asking us who is the killer; we assume Poole, but Wagner is the first person in the film to kill someone, and if they’re both killers, then who else? Maybe the guy at the office in the next cubicle, on his second pack of Camels for the day, who fought at Iwo Jima…
However, The Killer Is Loose is more than just a rung on cinema’s ladder. The film offers a rationale for the broken of America, the veterans unsuited to combat and the effects of such men on society long after they arrived home. For an art form which now serves so much noise instead of satisfying distraction or, when it manages to overlook its first world problems and smugly pats its own back when it gestures towards an analysis of society, such a close look at how one’s man’s life can speak for countless others has to be welcomed, appreciated and enjoyed.
Now imagine you are an Anytown American of the 1950s at the cinema. One ticket gets you in for South Pacific (1958), another, The Killer is Loose (1956). The musical distracts and entertains, the thriller examines and demonstrates; two films, one a salve, the other an X-ray, and yet both born in war. Which film would you choose? Which would you see?
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