L'ora del delitto

The first clue that there's something seriously out of kilter in Irving Rapper's Strange Intruder is that Ida Lupino takes second billing to Edmund Purdom. Looking like an unsettling cross between Rock Hudson and Gregory Peck (with Ronald Coleman's plummy voice thrown in), this British bore soon wore out his Hollywood welcome and spent the bulk of his career in Italian cheapies.

The movie opens with a grim and lengthy prologue in a Korean prisoner-of-war camp, where Purdom watches his best buddy die at the hands of the sadistic guards. Then we're whisked to a veterans' hospital stateside, where he's being released, the staff there having done `all we can do.' It transpires that Purdom has gone loony as a June bug. He sets off to visit the family of his dead friend, details of whose life he has digested as though it were his own.

He shows up in a fantasy version of small-town life in midcentury, where every middle-class household boasts a live-in cook. Grey-haired mom, wheelchair-bound pop and pert little Sis welcome him into their lives as though he were their returning son. But he has bigger fish to fry. The delusionary voices in his head are telling him to kill his buddy's kids in order to save them from their slut of a mother (Lupino).

Lupino (you see) fell victim to a suave French gigolo. They had an affair, which Lupino divulged in the last letter her husband, off saving Asia from Communism, received. And now he's blackmailing her...

To note that this movie echoes the previous year's Night of the Hunter would be to extend it, inadvertently, undeserved praise. Heavy-handed and implausible, it rings false from first frame to last. And here's the final nail in the coffin: Even Lupino can't save it.

Strange Intruder (1956)

Well, there were two things that really made me perk up for this B-movie: Ida Lupino as the lead and Ernest Haller as the cinematographer. The plot promised to be really quirky bordering on sensational, a story of vengeance in the cruelest sense. And the director, Irving Rapper, is a known quantity, too, having directed "Now Voyager" and a great version of "The Glass Menagerie."

It also begins with a kind of nasty vigor you might expect from the a Rapper depiction of a Korean War camp. But this is just a prelude to the movie, which takes place back in the US. There are issues right away, however--night scenes that are obviously day, people dying from gunfire with excessive theatrics, and even the spliced in documentary footage of warplanes dropping bombs nearby. But there is also a key friendship between two men established, and a kind of messianic killing of one of them.

So, eleven minutes in, we return to the US. The leading character is the survivor of the two, Paul Quentin, played by an English actor Edmund Purdom (Quentin explains he was naturalized before enlisting). Back home, he now as to readjust to normal life. This is a kind of film noir staple, of course (except his Britishness), but it turns dark in an unexpected way. His announced mental issues complicate how we read his erratic behavior. Much more than WWII, this was a symptom of returning Korean War soldiers, famously brainwashed and abused in prisons.

A slow, steady tension is built and when Lupino playing the widow finally appears halfway through the film, there is a conflict of memories because it's not her husband but her husband's friend at the family piano. She is filled not with sorrow for her dead husband but with angst over having been a bad wife to him while he was at war. It becomes clear that Quentin is there not to be friendly, but to exact some kind of justice on behalf of his war buddy, not so much on the wife (who he merely disdains) but on the children, who luckily are are boarding school for a couple days.

The resolution to this odd (and improbable) situation might have had power, but it is mostly just creepy and unsatisfying. It's almost as if there was once a truly horrifying and sinister trajectory that was aborted once they realized the audiences of the time (including many vets and survivors of men killed in action) wouldn't accept it. Lupino does a decent job with a handcuffed script, because she is really only acting repentant and tense the whole time. It is Quentin who is the man in the middle of it all, smarmy with the family and cruel with the widow. But he doesn't make much happen, and by the end you're like, "What?"

I've already said too much, I suppose, and if the plot sounds like a terrific melodrama, it could have been. It had potential.

Purdom plays a combat shocked veteran back home to visit his best friend's widow, and consider his dying wish that he kill her children because they are being raised by her new French lover. Combat scenes of chaos open the show, it seems those North Koreans are good at stabbing with bayonets and making prisoners drink dirty water. A strange suspension of disbelief is introduced. It seems Purdom might be an incurable psychopath, but the veteran's hospital released him anyway. How it ends might be quite a surprise as Ida Lupino struggles to bring him back to safe base.

Director Irving Rapper had seen much better days (remember "Now Voyager" or "Menagerie of Glass"?) when he worked on the mise en scène of this quite bizarre flick. It starts as a war movie in a Korean torture camp, then switches to poverty-ridden melodrama, Peyton Place and Douglas Sirk style (even Gloria Talbott from "All that heaven allows" is here!), to end up as a cheap thrill version of "Night of the Hunter". There's plenty of incredible action and silly dialogue in this story about a young Korean vet who returns to fulfil a promise he gave to a dying comrade: to kill his kids in order to spare them a life with some stepfather if his wife/widow should marry again. And so a man has to do what he's gotta do. But the kids are such cuties (and so is their mom)and melodramatic effects come rising. Technically well crafted and thoroughly entertaining in spite of the crappy story, this is a must-see for bad movie aficionados!