The Missing Juror

NOTE: Don't read the cast credit on IMDb or this movie won't even be a mystery for the first 15 minutes.

For the first 15 minutes I thought this movie was not bad (not good, but at least a reasonable example of the B mystery movie genre). The problem occurs in minute 16, or thereabout, when the movie starts to telegraph it's punch so clearly that only an idiot wouldn't see who the killer really is, and what the wrap up is going to be. After that you can turn the movie off, except that stopping is like ceasing to watch a bad accident that you know you shouldn't be looking at. Actually, a bad accident is a lot more interesting than this movie.

I won't give away the "surprise". Instead I'll let you participate in the contest to see if you can guess what I was able to figure out by the time of the fire in the mental hospital. It was so obvious that you would have be from Mars to not figure it out.

I like a good bad movie, but this isn't one of those. Try some other movie with "Juror" in the title - any other movie with "Juror" in the title.

It looks like an early Richard Fleischer's movie for RKO, or also Bob Wise's for the same studio. But Columbia did the very same for the likes of Budd Boetticher, Edward Dmytryk, William Castle, hirig them for short and fast paced thrillers. This one is excellent as another from Boetticher: BEHIND LOCKED DOORS, that I will comment tomorrow. This topic looks much like the thirties mystery yarns, but here it moves up a gear. Boetticher was a real gifted good director, it also reminds me early Anthony Mann's films, for RKO if my memory is good. Nothing here let us guess this film maker will be a provider of awesome little westerns, starring Randolph Scott.

The story may have more holes than Grandma's sieve, but it's still worth catching up with. For one, it's got cult actress Janis Carter who always shows more eyeball than ought to be legally allowed, along with the high-class George Macready just then perfecting his mad cackle-- and whoever in production thought his cultured voice was not a dead give-a-way. It's also one of director Buddy Boetticher's first outings, and already he's a camera master—catch those graceful dolly moves across the cut-a-way rooms. Then there's literary muscleman and masseuse Mike Mazurki throttling Macready's face blue while on a flight of poetic abandon. I just wish some of that imagination had carried over to repairing the story holes, like how crank-confessor Trevor Bardette knows so many details of the killings. Speaking of Bardette, his highly enthused performance suggests A-grade pay for a B-grade movie, making his mad lather a movie high point. Clearly, the 50-dollar budget didn't go into lighting since some scenes resemble a bat's cave and require the eyes of one to make out what's happening. Nonetheless, the film has almost as many promising noirish elements as the classic Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)—as another reviewer aptly compares. Too bad someone didn't send the script down to Rewrite for some hole-plugging plaster.

There is not one juror going missing here, but they are all gradually being disposed of one by one, until only five remain. We never learn what ever happened to those last five.

Jim Bannon plays the reporter who starts paying attention to the case, investigating it and digging it up, while the murders just go on. The case is the problem of a murderer convicted of a murder he did not commit, he is sentenced to be hanged, and not until in the last moments before his hanging he is pardoned, as the case is solved. But he is already destroyed, distraught by the hardships in the prison with the terrible psychological torture of daily having to witness other convicts being brought out to be hanged, and he has to be confined to a mental asylum. There he hangs himself and destroys all traces of himself by setting fire to the cell. The case is closed, but that's how it opens.

You will immediately grasp the plot if you are not stupid, but although it's all self-evident, it keeps developing and getting more complicated, as another is caught for the murders who confesses to all of them in detail. So where does this labyrinth lead?

It is one of Budd Boetticher's early films, and already here he excels with his special tricks, number one being an excellent camera work, supported by exquisite photo. In spite of all its B-superficiality, the film is worth watching - and enjoying. It is also graced by Janis Carter's enchanting appearance.

....which is so opposite reality as to be intentionally misleading.

"Juror" is NOT noir.

It IS a poorly-written B "mystery", with little of that, but plenty of under- and over-acting.

You can't even call it a pot-boiler because it never catches fire.

The only reason it's "rarely seen" on TV these days is that only TCM would show it. (But you'll never see Osborne or Mankiewicz introducing it.)

With the exception of classics like "The Wizard of Oz", "Gone With the Wind" and "It's a Wonderful Life", no network today will broadcast movies over 30 years old in order to attract that all-important 18-35 demographic.

This clunker has nothing in common with "Stranger On The Third Floor" and it's an insult to say it's a twist on "And Then There Were None."

"Juror" was just a paycheck for Budd Boetticher, who moved on to direct and team with Randolph Scott for some truly great 1950s westerns.

Watch them, not this.