Crime Against Joe

Struggling artist, Joe Manning (John Bromfield) goes out on a drinking binge. His evening takes a bizarre turn when a sleepwalking woman (Patricia Blair) crosses his path.

From this point, Joe's luck changes, and he gets mixed up in a murder. With the cops on his trail, Joe sets out to prove his innocence and track down the real killer.

CRIME AGAINST JOE is an enjoyable crime drama / mystery. There are some nice twists and a satisfying finale. Bromfield is convincing in his desperate role.

Co-stars the incredibly beautiful, Julie London, years before her Dixie McCall days!...

This is a strange offbeat little movie. At times it is dumb and clichéd 1950's police drama and at times it is philosophical and quite interesting.

In the second scene of the movie, we have Joyce Jameson running at full speed screaming that she's been attacked. It is quite jilting. Unfortunately, the rest of the movie never matches the energy of this scene.

The standout in the cast is Julie London. She is best known as a successful 1960's singer of sultry ballads, but she did do a number of acting gigs. Here she plays a car hop named "Slacks." She is in love with the lead character "Joe." However Joe shows only a passing interest in her, as she has dated his good friend "Red." Julie manages to make the character extremely sweet, nice and strong. She is the opposite of a Femme Fatale, a real Penelope standing by her man.

Rebecca Blair (from the television series "Daniel Boone")is the only other person in the cast I knew. She literally "sleepwalks" though her part, although she does have one good scene at the end as a troubled teenager confronting her overprotective "Dad." While the sum does not add up to much, some individual scenes are clever enough to make this "Wrong Man" genre piece worth watching. It was apparently filmed in five days, so don't go in expecting great production values. For those who like early Roger Corman movies, you'll probably enjoy the similar style.

Crime Against Joe (1956)

The point of seeing a B movie like this isn't always to find a great masterpiece in the rough. There are the moments or originality, the bit performances, the style of photography or writing. But there is also the glimpse into a time period that sometimes seems more real exactly because it isn't all polished up and idealized.

And this is a pretty interesting, not so bad movie. It's set and shot in Tucson in 1955 (there's a calendar on one wall), a very low point for Hollywood movies, and this is coming from the fringes of that (one of the producers was the "third writer" in "Casablanca). There is one star, of sorts, a white crooner (and looker) named Julie London, who is lovely and sincere and not half bad..

John Bromfield is the centerpiece, and if he's a hair clunky, this makes him kind of more believable as a good-looking guy named Joe Manning on the outs. He's an ex-soldier who thinks he's an artist but knows not a very good one. He drinks too much. He wants a woman in his life, and the movie begins with him kissing his wise mother goodnight and he goes out on the town. "Well, I'm looking for a girl," he says to the singer from the bar (another torch singer, Alika Louis, who appears here in her only movie).

One of the social revelations of the movie is attitudes toward drinking and driving. Joe gets hammered while sitting in his car, drives to a diner, and is visibly drunk as a couple of cops say hello to him (one even chuckles, as if it's kind of funny). More chilling encounters with the cops come later. A killer is bumbling around town, and it looks like it's either Joe (and we don't know it) or the cops are going to think it's Joe (and it's not). It's a pretty tense situation held back only by some occasional awkwardness.

What makes it work, though, is the down to earth acting because it builds up the Hitchcockian mood of a wrong man under suspicion. Witnesses misinterpret things, evidence gets piled up based on presumptions. It's good stuff. And then Joe has to figure out the crime for himself, which he applies himself to with intelligence. (His acting gets better as he sobers up.)

And by the end you see why the movie has its title. It's no masterpiece, but it has enough going on to keep a movie lover glue, I'm sure.

John Bromfield is Joe in "Crime Aganst Joe" a 1956 B film also featuring Julie London, Patricia Blair, Joyce Jameson, Alika Louis, Rhodes Reason and Henry Calvin.

Bromfield plays an artist who lives off of his mother (Frances Morris) and laments not being able to find the perfect woman. When a bar singer (Louis) winds up dead after he's left the bar dead drunk, his high school pin is found next to her body.

He then becomes a person of interest to the police. Joe has an alibi - he actually ran into a sleepwalker (Blair) and returned her to her home, but her father lies to the police about it. Joe is then arrested.

Joe's waitress friend Slacks (London) lies to the police about seeing the singer with someone else, and Joe is released. He's determined to find out the identity of the killer - someone from his high school class.

Supposedly the story was by Decla Dunning and the script was by Robert C. Dennis. I'd love to know which one was responsible for the sleepwalker bit and that whole subplot of the overly possessive father who discourages his daughter's dates - it's a riot. That plot line just sort of died out and wasn't fully resolved.

That business of the high school pin...well, this is a pretty flimsy film, and I figured it out fairly quickly. It's made very cheaply, too - the sound in all the interiors has an echo.

Julie London is slightly miscast as the waitress friend - if the singer hadn't gotten killed after just one song and a few lines, London would have been perfect for that role, and it would have given her a chance to be her usual glamorous self. The murdered singer, however, played by Alika Louis, is very attractive and a great type.

Blair as the poor repressed sleepwalker is very pretty in full makeup and perfectly coiffed hair as she sleepwalks in her nightgown. Bromfield's acting is loud and not very good or believable, but I liked Frances Morris, who played his mother.

Nice of her to support him, but from the looks of those canvasses, he wasn't going to be making much of a living painting.

Not very good.

Amateur night in Tucson! Melodramatic (and rather fruity) murder-mystery/character portrait, made quickly and on the cheap in Arizona, could be called "The Shame of Sleepwalking". Unemployed artist named Joe--still living at home with Mom, whom he calls "Nora"--is wrongly accused of attacking girls at night. He's temporarily released from police custody after a smitten carhop comes to his defense (she lies because she loves him!). Unfortunately, her alibi doesn't hold up, so the two become fast-working sleuths to get Joe off the hook. Co-feature from Bel-Air Productions, distributed by United Artists, is surprisingly enjoyable despite wooden acting and directing. As Joe, John Bromfield is a lousy drunk but he improves (his unself-conscious manly swagger is also winning). Playing Joe's secret sweetheart--nicknamed "Slacks" (no girlie business with this lady)--Julie London is a bit too mature and refined to be convincing as a drive-in waitress, yet her stoic demeanor proves appealing as well. The denouement is satisfying, plus there's an amusingly weird side plot about a society girl suffering subconscious distress while living under the thumb of her possessive father. *** from ****