L'otage du gang

Unusual. Despite pacing problems and pockets of clumsy dialogue, it has some good insights into the criminal mind as well as the minds of those who feel the need to mythologize outlaws that literally get away with murder. It's bolstered by a wise, unsentimental performance from Jay C. Flippen as a hard-nosed con rolling the dice one last time, and Paul Richards' strange turn as a neurotic, scarily unpredictable gunman. (He is involved in a bizarre, never-saw-it-coming act of violence about half way in that really gets your attention - to put it mildly.) Leslie Nielsen is fine as the out of work newspaperman desperate for a good story, but Colleen Miller is barely adequate as his new bride. You never buy that she would marry someone without a job, nor can you accept his decision to stir things up with the locals on their honeymoon so soon, especially in her presence. She comes across as mystifyingly accepting of the situation, and at times seems to be in some kind of a trance-like state.

But its strengths outweigh its flaws. The script is gutty and resourceful and the director, David Friedkin, creates a sense of real isolation, a feeling that this small, dingy town isn't so much a whole different planet as much as it is a kind of black hole. If you ever get caught in it, you can be sure you'll have a devil of a time getting out. Good suspense and an exciting finish. Always fun to uncover curious little efforts like this. Definite cult possibilities.

By 1957, the dark fire of the noir cycle had all but died down, yet amid the embers were a few live coals. Plunder Road was one; another is Hot Summer Night. It stars the young Leslie Nielsen, then being groomed as a tough romantic lead, as an out-of-work newspaper man from Kansas City on his honeymoon in the Ozarks who can't pass up a lead on a brutal bank robbery.

Trouble is, in the possum-run of a town he's staying in, the head of the gang (Robert Wilke) has become a local hero; nobody wants to whisper a word, both out of pride and fear of reprisal. When Nielsen finally gets taken to the rural hideout, long-simmering violence among the thieves erupts, and he finds himself held for ransom by the trigger-happy new leader (Paul Richards). Meanwhile the poor bride (Colleen Miller) doesn't know where her husband has disappeared to, and finds herself running into the same obstinate wall of silence....

Produced by MGM (which head of production Dore Schary had nudged toward noir), Hot Summer Night boasts a clean, straightforward script, a score by André Previn, and a roster of well-cast players even in small parts, among them Marianne Stewart, Claude Akins, and the always excellent Jay C. Flippen. It's a modest but workmanlike picture that holds up well close to half a century after its release.

Note: Another commentator called this movie `Ma and Pa Kettle meet Cornell Woolrich.' While the point is appreciated, the immortal Kettles made their debut in the Claudette Colbert/Fred MacMurray vehicle The Egg and I of 1947, which was set in the Pacific Northwest, not, as is often assumed, in the Ozarks or Appalachia.

Newlyweds Leslie Nielsen and Colleen Miller are traveling through the Ozarks in search of a story. He's a recently laid off reporter and what he's looking for is an interview with a John Dillinger like criminal who is from there and is a local legend. And the town is very protective f that legend.

It takes a while but Nielsen finds the legend played by Robert Wilke. He gets his interview. But quite suddenly Nielsen becomes the story.

A lot of familiar character players turn in some top drawer performances. No stars in this film give it a nice authentic ring. if I had to choose one it would be Paul Richards ho made a career of playing deranged individuals. Richards may have got a career role here.

No frills for ts B film, but a great cast and story.

A very late entry in the film noir cycle--and a small-town noir at that!--HOT SUMMER NIGHT is well-done in just about every way. Except for a few awkward dialogue passages between Leslie Nielsen and Colleen Miller in the man-wife scenes (a small part of the film), the film combines the best qualities of BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (outsider comes into hostile, secretive small town and is rejected) and PETRIFIED FOREST ("regular" characters held hostage by philosophizing criminals delivering stage-like soliloquies). The film also has multiple levels of social commentary, is full of unexpected and even shocking brief spurts of violence that send the plot in unexpected directions, and is acted perfectly by virtually every supporting actor in the cast. Each character (except for the wife) is three-dimensional and complex and somewhat contradictory...just like real people! Younger viewers might be surprised to see Leslie Nielsen strutting around in a t-shirt and acting like a tough guy, but he does it convincingly and his character--a newspaperman specializing in crime stories--would need to be able to turn the tough-guy persona on when he dealt with criminals in his work. Among the supporting players, Paul Richards is fantastic as the psycho Elly, a role that may have gone to Montgomery Clift or James Dean in a bigger-budgeted film. Richards, who has a huge body of television work, passed away in 1974, but I'm anxious to seek out his work as he is a major talent. James Best also gives one of his finest-ever dramatic performances here as Kermit, the abrasive punk who is far more complex than he seems to be when we first meet him as he assaults Leslie Nielsen in a bar. The soundtrack by Andre Previn is so good, I wish I could buy a copy. There's lots of fine sax-driven rock'n'roll in the bar sequences, and the piano trio material (presumably played by Previn himself) is worthy of being released as a jazz album. The film goes in a completely unexpected direction at the mid-point, and even the climax, though not entirely unexpected, had me on the edge of my seat. As a study of the nature of crime and the nature of small-town society, or as an entertaining 1950s crime film, HOT SUMMER NIGHT is one of those studio b-movies that is so much better than it needed to be--everyone involved with it clearly wanted to make something special and memorable even though working in an assembly-line studio format, and they succeeded admirably. Don't miss it the next time it plays on TCM.

Late fifties Metro addition to the film noir genre, Ozarks-style, featuring Leslie Nielsen. A comedy, you say,--perish the thought! Nielsen was in his 'next-Glenn Ford' phase, and plays it straight down the line, no chaser, no jokes, and he's very good. This is an exceedingly well-crafted, offbeat little thriller about a big city reporter in over his head as he tracks down a legendary outlaw in an extremely backward, backwoods community. The sense of isolation is very well built up, as is the cluelessness of the man and his wife, who simply don't know what to do, or even how to talk to these people. Among the denizens of the backwoods are such choice Hollywood masters of the cretinous as Claude Akins and James Best. The po-faced Paul Richards plays an unhinged character; a nice piece of offbeat casting, this. Robert Wilkie manages to be both warm and frightening as the honcho bad guy. What makes the film work is its marvelous and all-pervading sense of not only the unknown but the unknowable, as we learn just how naive city folks can be when out of their element. It is literally a night movie, thus there is no question about it being film noir. Strangeness lurks everywhere on these back roads, where one might expect Robert Mitchum to turn up, or maybe Bonnie and Clyde, or maybe Jeff Dahmer. One never can tell. You think rural communities are idyllic? Think again. The biggest surprise and most charming performance in the film by far is by Edward Andrews, who normally plays smarmy, scheming or mean-spirited white collar types, often with a comic touch, totally absent here. In Hot Summer Night he is the local sheriff, and he is salvation itself. The movie just goes to show, for the umpteenth time, how far creative people can go with seemingly routine material; how it can be exciting and shocking and even, in its presentation, new. It also shows how fun it can be to see stereotypes played with, altered, turned upside down and inside out, both as to casting, locale and viewer expectation.