The Sun Sets at Dawn

Patrick Waltz is to be executed at dawn. All the wire services and papers in the state are covering it because it's the first use of the state's brand new electric chair. Waltz says he didn't do it, but no one else could have. His girl, Sally Parr, is heartbroken.

Writer-Director Paul Sloan has cinematographer Lionel Lindon shoot it as a peculiarly sparse film noir. The movie takes place in two locations: the prison, and a truck stop run by Housely Stevens, where the reporters wait and discuss what happened. There is no flashback, no femme fatale, and the villain of the piece turns out to be ambiguous. Sloan's world may be black and white, but his story resides in the grey.

Sloan was one of the early auteurs of American film. He broke into the movies as a writer for Edison. His first credit was as co-writer of THE COSSACK WHIP. By 1925, he was writing and directing his own movies for Paramount: 24 of them by 1939. Then nothing until this one, released by Eagle-Lion. Two years he turned out his last movie, in Japan. He died in 1963, aged seventy.

It's a bare outline of a life I offer for a bare outline of a third act for a film noir.

The direction of this 1950 movie I found unrelieved by excessive mawkishness, gloom and melodrama.Like a piece of music all written in a minor key or a picture painted in dark forbidding colours with no light patches.The low budget film studio could not afford to pay famous star actor/director fees to bring in the punters so had to produce and cast the film on poverty row.I suspected as such when I did not recognise one star name in the opening credits.

The danger of executing someone wrongly convicted of murder when the sentence cannot be revoked after capital punishment is ever present in a society which uses this form of justice and which evolves over time.Up until 1965 we had capital punishment in our country and although MP's are given a free vote, since then, the restoration of capital punishment has been debated but never reintroduced.This is how Ian Brady & Myra Hindley (the moor murderers) escaped the gallows.The national feeling of this case was so intense, successive Home Secretaries maintained life sentences on these two criminals until they died of natural causes.

To illustrate how bad the direction was, in "The Sun Sets at Dawn" the set had the condemned and cast members all apparently walking through the Warden's private office, almost like a t.v. black comedy with the electrical process continually not working; when in reality such people would have been kept apart until a more appropriate moment.Adequate 5/10.

Time seems to stand still in this sluggish suspense snorer that could use some juice from the old sparky awaiting to fry the wrong man in The Sun Sets at Dawn. Even at a slim 71 minutes it still manages to grind interminably along as it trudges from one doom and gloom scene to the next.

It looks like Bill is about to be executed for a murder he did not commit. His girl, the warden, a priest know better and suffer along with him as the hours count down. At the bus depot down the road cynical reporters assemble with guards from the prison having supper, a prison trustee and as luck would have it the real killer making himself conspicuous. While the reporters unravel the case through speculation the trustee tries to get the the guards attention about the convenient presence of the killer but they'll have none of it - neither should the audience.

Dawn auteur Paul Sloane's first casualty is credulity with its ridiculous staging and premise. The dialog is trite with the tortured scenes between Bill and the priest cloying and stilted. The "Front Page" press box lacks the snappy patter and is strictly second string though it does offer up the best of what can be found in Sloane's disagreeable montage stew.

This is an unusual film in many ways, but most striking to me is that the director, Paul Sloane, a silent film auteur who had made the transition to sound and then inexplicably vanished from the industry for more than a decade, suddenly reappeared to write and direct what is essentially a silent movie (with conventional 1950-era sound), starring quite a cast of silent era actors.

Almost everything in this movie is antique -- the large cast of older men as reporters, the elderly "Pops" who runs the diner, the frozen-in-amber look of the sets for the warden's home and his office in the prison -- and this elegiac effect is heightened by the continual references to times gone by and the display of worn-out and bypassed items, such as the out-of-date Post Office "Wanted" posters that Pops has learned to love. Even the direction of the unknown young "Girl" is reminiscent of Murnau's direction of Janet Gaynor in 1927's "Sunrise."

If you look up the bios of the actors, you will see that at least half of them were over 50 and some were in their late 60s. Did Paul Sloane just come out of hibernation, hire all of his old colleagues and have one last go at it? I don' think we will ever know -- but for whatever reason he did it, the film is very satisfying if you think of it as a "silent film with sound."

I rated it an 8, which i rarely do for "B" films, because although it was filmed with minimal sets and although i tend to downgrade films that feature boyishly handsome priests called "Padre," (sorry, just a quirk of mine), this movie is unique, like a carton of mint-condition New-Old-Stock porcelain dolls found in the sealed-off back room of a diner on a sound stage somewhere in Post-War Los Angeles.

Don't be afraid to try it. Just love it for what it is.

If there's an object lesson in the gap between expectation and reality, The Sun Sets At Dawn may be it. A product of the Holiday Pictures division of Eagle-Lion Films (which is sort of like saying Starvation Alley off Poverty Row), and the work of a director, Paul Sloane, whose career began in the First World War and who hadn't worked for 11 years (and who had one more – Japanese – movie left in him), it doesn't inspire much confidence. But it has an imaginative narrative structure and a mood and, so much as its pitiful resources would allow, even something of a look.

Patrick Waltz (here billed as Philip Shawn) is a young man awaiting execution on death row. Though of course he protests his innocence, there's not much news there. But it so happens that he'll be the first consumer of the anonymous state's newly-installed electric chair (replacing the old-fashioned, and possibly more humane, garrotte). This shift of lethal mediums has the warden and the executioner and the staff all a-twitter, leaving them little time or empathy for the human side of the story – which also involves the condemned man's girlfriend (Sally Parr), who has been brought to the prison but whom he refuses to see.

The newfangled hot seat has drawn a large cadre of newspaper reporters (Percy Helton is but one of the many noir stalwarts among them), gathered at Pops' Place. This is a last-ditch bus depot/greasy spoon/post office/truck stop and motel out in the sticks, where they wait for a jitney to transport them to the prison. And here's where the movie takes its most arresting turn. In dialogue that might almost have been lifted from a Eugene O'Neill reject, the ink-stained wretches start reminiscing and speculating, cumulatively telling the story of the convict whose death they're shortly to witness – and other stories which start to intersect with it.

The plot moves slowly, as piece after piece drops into place. Sloane (who also wrote the script) intercuts between the terrified young man awaiting his quietus and these old hacks who think they've seen it all (they haven't). Meanwhile, a trusty from the prison comes to collect the mail, and spots a wanted poster on the bulletin board which sets him to thinking, too....

Basically, The Sun Sets At Dawn remains little more than another death-row beat-the-clock thriller. The plot, which accommodates more than a twist or two in a 71-minute running time, is admittedly contrived, but Sloane has the decency (and wit) to justify his every contrivance. And even if its turnings leave you unimpressed, you'll have to admit that the movie's dialogue-free opening, at night at Pops' Place, is as bleak and transfixing as just about anything in the noir cycle (shoestring-budget division). The Sun Sets At Dawn proves itself a keeper, and a fitting memorial to the unsung Sloane.