Chain of Evidence

The low-budget, room-to-room direction aside, CHAIN OF EVIDENCE... the penultimate thriller with former cowboy actor Bill Elliott as friendly cop Lt. Andy Doyle... is intriguing enough, featuring Jimmy Lydon as an ex-convict with amnesia, a favorite Film Noir disease allowing the plot to fall into two other Noir staples: a wife and her lover kills the rich, unattractive husband, and poor Jimmy Lydon becomes the Wrong Man...

Why he'd gone to jail in the first place has to do with cult actor Timothy Carey, who once again clenches his teeth while talking as yet another clenched-teeth lowlife.. this one a victim of getting beat up for flirting with the otherwise nice guy's girlfriend (Tina Carver); the latter whining through the more melodramatic sequences as her man goes through accusations that seem impossible to clear: he'd fought with the husband right before the wife's lover finished the job...

And while these kind of cuckold pot-boilers spend most of the time building a "perfect murder," the quick pull-off is a letdown for the audience yet allows main star Elliott a chance to wander around, ask a lot of questions and chain-smoke, like movie-cops do: providing scheming wife Polly Gunther a suburban femme fatale role that deserved a better platform; yet her input here makes EVIDENCE better than it would've been otherwise.

In this film where Bill Elliott is playing Lieutenant Doyle of the Los Angeles County Sheriff, he's made a reclamation project of first offender James Lydon. Six months on the honor farm and a new job.

But Lydon doesn't show up for the job. He's beaten with an iron pipe and then rolled by a passing tramp so no identification. He shows up miles away in a small town and gets taken in by Ross Elliott who is giving handiwork around the house and also as a mechanic.

But Lydon's arrival without any memory of who he is provides a great opportunity for Ross Elliott's wife to kill him and provide a fall guy for the crime. Shades of Double Indemnity.

Again, not bad, but not anything that wasn't on network television.

After making his last western in 1954, Wild Bill Elliott made five excellent hard-boiled police films as Lt. Andy Doyle (Flynn in one). They were low-budget, streamlined films that hold up well today, and Elliott's stoic, tough persona works very well in the police genre. This one features James "Strange Illusion" Lydon as a prisoner getting out of jail for a minor offense, someone who is vouched for by Elliott as an honest man. Obviously, things DO NOT work out well for him! The supporting cast besides Lydon is excellent, including Timothy Carey as (of course) an abusive punk and Meg Randall as a cafe operator who's itching for romance. There's an amnesia-related plot, but I'll let you find out for yourself. It plays a lot like a 50s syndicated tv crime show, and like the others in this series it's got enough noir atmosphere and hard-boiled grit to satisfy the dedicated crime-film fan. It's hard to find, but if the description interests you, you'll find it worthwhile. I've now seen four of the five films in this series and all so far are great!

I reminded seeing this movie thanks to Timothy Carey's character, a nasty one, as you can guess. Don't miss this scene of his shadow on the wall of the one way street wall, when he hits the poor man with an iron stick. It seems a detail but I found it properly terrifying. The rest, this amnesia case, remains interesting, especially with Bill Elliot in a modern crime film instead a western, when he used to be, but not that exceptional after all. Paul Landres is a grade B director whose films would deserve to be discovered again. He made westerns, science fiction, crime and war features, mostly out of range, maybe in private vaults or attics.