Inner Sanctum

Inner Sanctum (1948)

A short, bizarre, surprisingly captivating film. It's totally Twilight Zone when you get to the last two minutes, so hang in there for the hour before that. It has a noir quality that makes it moody, and it has some truly artsy expressionist segments montaged in during the flood, partly as psychological metaphor. The director, Lew Landers, has an astonishing 100 plus movies and a lot of early television to his name, and I'm guessing there are some other sterling moments among them.

But for the moment we have Inner Sanctum. There is a candid, campy acting throughout that's fresh and entertaining, from the boy who's a convincing sweetie to the reporter who's a total bumbling hoot (watch him cheat at checkers). If it borders on deliberate comedy at times, it's more sustained by its tone of utter innocence among the townspeople, so they joke and make odd comments exactly the way real people would. The candid quality is at odds with the one rather stiff character, the lead man, who carries some kind of weight around beyond even his crime. Such is the film noir lead at its archetypal best, and this is from the height of post-war noir.

So, a great movie it isn't but a movie with great qualities it is. No joke.

'Inner Sanctum' is, although quite interesting and thrilling, wasted opportunity as quality film-noir. The film opens with a scene on a train where elegantly dressed woman meets Dr. Valonius (Fritz Leiber) who tells her the story about woman being killed be her fiancee. We then are thrown in the story in the midst of the killing scene. Harold Dunlap (Charles Russell) accidentally kills the woman who's attacking him. He is shocked by his deed, and rids himself from the body by throwing it on the back of the departing train. Unfortunately, young kid Mike (Dale Belding) sees Harold dumping the package on the train. Harold tries to flee the small town, but all the roads are closed because of the floods. He is picked up by local newspaperman McFee (Billy House), who drops him off at the boarding house ran by his close friend Mrs. Mitchell (Nana Bryant). In there Harold meets a young woman Jean (Mary Beth Hughes), who herself with a shaded past, starts to feel immediate sympathy towards mysterious Harold. Unfortunately, in the same house lives the boy Mike with his mother, and when the stories about the dead woman found on the train, reach the town, Mike starts to but one and one together.

The film has nice eerie atmosphere, and the story inside the story is interesting with Dr. Valonius storyline drawing nice circle around the main plot and neatly tying the knots. But the film seems bit rushed, as the director haven't allowed the psychological tension between the character grow enough. Otherwise neat little film-noir that manages to keep the viewer interested enough to sit through barely over an hour running time.

Inner Sanctum is directed by Lew Landers and written by Jerome T. Gollard. It stars Charles Russell, Mary Beth Hughes, Dale Belding, Billy House, Fritz Leiber, Nana Bryant and Lee Patrick. Music is by Leon Klatzkin and cinematography by Allen G. Siegler.

A psychic tells a woman, Marie Kembar (Eve Miller), a story on board a train. He tells of a man, Harold Dunlap (Russell), who after killing a woman makes his way into town and finds he can't leave after a flood renders all residents confined to the area. Taking lodgings in a boarding house, Dunlap finds he is sharing a room with the only witness to his crime...

Clocking in at just over an hour in length, Inner Sanctum is very much in the vein of a quintessential "B" programmer. Part noir suspenser, part Twilight Zone mystery, it's a quirky little picture that manages to blend off-kilter humour with genuine tenseness. Starting off with the ambiguously filmed killing of a woman, who is then unceremoniously dumped on the observation platform of a departing train, the film then unravels in small town Americana in a manner befitting Hitchcock. Enter a group of colourful/eccentric/shifty characters in one boarding house and the story explodes in to an array of fakes, fancies, vagaries of fate, youthful innocence and dangerous sexual attractions. All filmed in a deliberately noir style of murky shades and half lights.

The production value is inevitably low, but it works in the narrative's favour. The acting is a mixed bag, but there is nothing here to hurt the flow or feel of the picture. Standing out are Russell (The Purple Heart) who is wonderfully sly and cunning, Patrick (The Maltese Falcon/Mildred Pierce) who plays the harried mother role with verve and doting dominance, and young Belding has the requisite amount of bratty boyishness and confused innocence. But best of the bunch is Hughes (The Great Flamarion/The Ox-Bow Incident), who slinks her way through the movie making moves on Dunlap even when she knows what he has done! Yes she's that desperate to thrive on danger and get out of this small town nowhereville. This characterisation is just one of the many pessimistic touches that help to make Inner Sanctum a rewarding experience. Killer ending as well! 7/10

This is a cool little B movie that I almost didn't give a shot, but ultimately did because it has the Inner Sanctum title. It starts on a train, where a creepy dude with white hair stares at a woman and hints that he has clairvoyant powers. The woman, who is a bit of a chore to talk to honestly, complains about her boring fiancé and the boring train ride. So the creepy guy tells her a story, which plays out over the course of the hour and proves to be relevant to her in a twist at the end. The story is about a man who impulsively commits a murder at night and then tries to escape, but bad weather forces him back into the town where the murder was committed. Ironically he winds up staying in a boarding home run by the mother of a boy who witnessed the murder without realizing it at the time.

Fritz Leiber's turn as the clairvoyant on the train is pretty interesting for the time. There's something so weird about him and the way his character's scenes play out. I can't think of anything else quite like it in horror or mystery films of that era. Charles Russell is good as the guy not trying quite hard enough to get away with murder. Dale Belding plays the kid and he's as corny as they come but offers quite a bit of unintended comedy ("Think of all the things I could be doing right now -- if it wasn't for my mother."). I got 'low-budget Shadow of a Doubt vibes' from this film and most of that comes from the scenes between Russell and Belding. The supporting cast, full of several comic relief characters, is entertaining without distracting too much from the serious plot.

This is one of those movies where its cheap trappings works in its favor. The murkiness of many scenes helps add to the creepy atmosphere. The script is surprisingly decent with a number of memorable little lines. Director Lew Landers manages to build suspense effectively in key scenes. It's not a showy piece of work but it's impressive for what it is. By the way, this is not a part of Universal's Inner Sanctum anthology series from the 1940s starring Lon Chaney, Jr.

A man (Charles Russell) accidentally kills his fiancée as he exits a train. Just as the train pulls out, he drops her body on the rear platform. No one saw him do it, but someone does see him at the otherwise deserted station: a mischievous, freckle-faced boy. Later, he's walking along a road when the town's newspaper editor stops and gives him a lift. The editor tells his passenger that a flood has washed out the bridge. For now, there's no way out of town, so he takes the stranger to a boarding house. Fate decrees that of all houses, this is the one where the boy lives. The boy thinks he recognizes the new boarder. The new boarder thinks it's time to get rid of the boy. And a sexy blonde (Mary Beth Hughes) living at the house thinks it's time to run off with a man she knows is a murderer.

"Inner Sanctum" is a stand-alone film based on the radio series of the same name. That program was also the basis for Universal's godawful movie series, starring Lon Chaney, Jr., that had ended just two years before. "Inner Sanctum" is nothing like those films and much better. The story is efficiently told with sharp dialogue, an excellent framing device and good performances. Everyone involved worked well within the constraints of a small budget; and the movie remains an entertaining thriller that fits snugly into the latterly-invented genre of Film Noir.