The Sun Sets at Dawn

Offbeat dark drama concerning the hours before the execution of a young man protesting his innocence. Walter Reed gives a fine performance as the chaplain ministering to the man to be executed who gradually believes in his innocence. There is some unusual direction as the story moves back and forth from the young man protesting his situation in the cell to the newsmen holed up in a greasy spoon trying to substantiate his guilt. Noir regulars Percy Helton, King Donovan and Charles Arnt make up some of he newsmen. No doubt this is somewhat of a protest film against capital punishment but it never overplays this angle. There are some good plot twists that makes the movie more interesting. The acting is uniformly good and the film is a worthwhile viewing if you can wade through the depressing subject matter.

"The Sun Sets at Dawn" is a B-movie. Back in the 1930s-50s, B-movies were meant as a cheap second film in a double-feature. Because they were made quickly and inexpensively, they usually clocked in at about 55-70 minutes, had mostly unknown actors and are often today thought of as bad films. Well, the last part is definitely not true--as some B- movies manage to convey an excellent story and are quite entertaining. This is definitely the case with "The Sun Sets at Dawn", as it's extremely effective and entertaining--even without the frills of an A- picture.

When the film begins, the state is about to execute a young man. He's been convicted of murder and still insists he's not guilty. This much isn't unusual--but what is unusual is that everyone that seems to meet him and his girlfriend believes this as well. But the governor won't stop the scheduled death and it looks pretty hopeless. Can something manage to stop this possible miscarriage of justice?

The movie excels in many ways. The performances are awfully good, the writing quite nice as well (though some today might find some of it a bit heavy-handed) and the story really makes you think twice about the morality of the death penalty--especially in cases where it was never 100% proved that the condemned is actually guilty. Well made and worth seeing.

Incidentally, somehow this film slipped into the public domain and is available for a free download at archive.org.

The dialogue in this film is so dreadful, that after 20 minutes of the film, you are rooting for the execution to take place, despite the obvious innocence of the protagonist. Hackneyed writing will always get that kind of result. The script here is terrible. However, believe it or not, the lead actor and actress are even worse than the script. The protagonist, the intended innocent victim of the execution, gives one mundane line after another about his failures in life. After twenty minutes of this, one roots for the execution to take place. The female lead is even worse; bouncing from comatose to hysterical every ten minutes or so. I wish I could find something nice to say about this film, but when you start rooting for an innocent man to be fried, you know you are watching the wrong film. Avoid this turkey.

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.

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.