Shoot to Kill

This cheapie noir thriller about crooked district attorneys and gangster chiefs is surprisingly good, considered it was made on a zero budget with no reason to aim high. Of course, it is completely corny, but there are a lot of expressionistic camera angles, and the many dollying shots of men walking at night are surprisingly effective with a single bright spotlight on the face and everything else pitch black. As is usual with these over the top late forties cheapies, the impact depends largely upon an excessive, almost parodic, use of 'mood music'. When things begin to get dangerous, don't worry about looking for clues on the screen, as the orchestra will tell us instead. One wonders if the script actually said: 'At this point, the musical score will become hysterical, so that the audience knows someone is about to get killed.' The chief reason for watching this film is to see and hear the spectacular performance on the piano of Gene Rodgers, a black boogie player who was one of the best. It is jaw-dropping stuff. Fats Waller, eat your heart out! Rodgers plays two of his own compositions, 'Ballad of the Bayou' and 'Rajah's Blues'. His fingers move faster than the speed of light, and he isn't even looking. If only the whole thing had been Rodgers, we could have done without the film. The film's script is surprising in its ingenuity in places, and has some snappy dialogue, showing that somebody tried. The most innovative scene is where an assistant district attorney dictates a letter to his secretary. It is a passionate love letter proposing marriage, and she wonders to whom he intends to send it. He asks her if she thinks it is OK, and she says she thinks it is beautiful. Then he tells her it is for her! Great scene! If only the romance had been genuine, however, as both turn out to be crooks in their own way. This film contains serious contradictions, as it oscillates between making some characters appear sympathetic and then suddenly exposing them as baddies. The story must have started out as a tough crime thriller and then some frustrated sentimentalist wrote the script and could not help himself, he just had to have some love scenes, and the fact that the characters were all wrong for this could not and would not deter him. The producer clearly didn't notice. Well, if you like brilliant boogie, you really can't afford to miss this. And there will be people who will also enjoy the film. It is all a matter of what you expect, and if you start out expecting a corny mini-budgeted noir thriller with some unexpected good points, you will be happy.

Unremarkable but entertaining enough minor noir. Russell Wade is spirited as the newspaper man with a cause, Edmund MacDonald is the aspiring District Attorney but sales a little close to the wind and spends much time brooding in a Vincent Price sort of way. Luana Walters is the girl in the middle and halfway through the film brings everything to life with one of the very many twists. Unfortunately it has been a rather slow beginning and before the end tips back down. There is always an inherent problem with movies that are flashbacks and this one is no exception. Worth it though for Walters' performance when for a time the film revolves around her and we seem to be going places.

This is a typical crime film noir of the 1940s time era - really run of the mill. Brings nothing new to the genre. Almost everyone is a crook in this one - except the news reporter (who knows he might be a crook too). Even the wife of the gangster/crook is a crook and her crooked husband was being frame for something he didn't do, but with all the lying and backstabbing in this film maybe he really did do it? You do have to pay attention to this film because there is a lot to it, a lot going on in just over an hour. It's very fast paced with lots of two faced double-talk, backstabbing, lying and murders.

I found it funny that the wife was happy being a crook's wife and her husband slapped her - that's when she suddenly woke up and decided to live a straight life (at least that is what we are lead to believe in the end).

I didn't like anyone in this film really - I couldn't feel sympathy with anyone. What I really wanted to do was to hand them all machine guns through the screen and let them have at it. The actors who played the characters are really flat. The story was a little bit interesting at times. At times, really good cinematography... mysterious looking.

3/10

Better than most of the low budget thrillers, this is fun because it involves a series of flashbacks which explain why a woman has been badly injured due to her connection with a corrupt district attorney. The story is pretty well put forward with a minimum of stereotyping. The woman is really a fireball, putting herself in harm's way over and over. It's odd she survived as long as she did. Most of the characters are bad guys with their own agendas. There is some double crossing and an effort to expose a frame-up. I felt the ending was pretty well done, which isn't always the case in this genre. The acting is quite good because the bad guys are presented as human beings, with human failings and emotions. Not that they aren't pretty evil and pretty cold. It's worth a look.

This low-budget thriller about the wife of a crooked Assistant District Attorney and a reporter who sets out to expose him has some effective moments and several good performances, notably by veteran character actor Charles Trowbridge as the DA and the usually bland Edmund MacDonald as the ADA. Russell Wade, as the reporter, doesn't comer off too badly--usually he's even blander than MacDonald--and Luana Walters turns in a serviceable job as the DA's wife, but it's really Trowgbridge's and MacDonald's show, and they they do well with it. Prolific "B" director William Berke keeps things moving swiftly, and despite some weak supporting performances and a few large-ish plot holes, overall this is a very entertaining little"B".