When the Clock Strikes

This is an excellent little B-movie that takes place over the course of a few days at a place called Cady's Lodge.

The story revolves around several characters gathering at said lodge to mark time until the execution of a certain bad seed by the name of Frankie Pierce, who is receiving his just desserts one Friday evening down the road at the local penitentiary. The characters are all there for their own reasons and everything plays out to its logical conclusion.

The acting is bad; the dialogue even worse - "you tryin' to give me the creeps!?" and "rain or shine, one glass of beer."

But, for some bizarre reason the movie holds you with its genuineness at being nothing more or nothing less than 70 minutes of good old B-movie mystery.

Robert E. Kent (producer) and Edward L Cahn (director) made many low budget movies together in the later 50s and early 60s. Mainly, those movies stunk. the actors generally went for the monotone variety of bad acting, the settings were cheap and unimaginative, and the off screen narrator droned on and on and on and on. One suspects these movies live on because of the monsters and aliens that populate them, and give the rather dreary proceedings some camp value.

So this movie, which IS cheap, but has no monsters, aliens, or over-talky narrators, is a shock. This one is good, surprisingly moody, and does a pretty good job of covering the plot implausibilities with interesting characters. The result is something that looks like an extended episode of Playhouse 90, given the limited sets and somewhat undistinguished acting. It even takes on an issue of the day -- capital punishment -- with some degree of seriousness, and deals with many of the philosophical concerns found in noir movies in a notably non-noir way. (This may be good or bad, depending on your point of view.) In other word, this is worth seeing, but the viewer is going to have to make some allowances for so-so acting and an over-telegraphed plot twist.

Glamorous blonde hitching a lift, out in the wilds, in the middle of a violent storm - a bit odd somehow, and the sure sign that things are not what they seem in this story.

In a small roadhouse, several people are awaiting the chimes of midnight, when a condemned bank-robber will meet his fate at the local penitentiary. The blonde announces herself as his wife, but doesn't show much emotion about her imminent widowhood, apparently a hard-bitten cynic who cares for no-one and nothing (in other words, business as usual for Merry Anders).

Her rescuer turns out to be James Brown, left over from Rin Tin Tin, where he was Rusty's virtuous role model, a character essentially replicated here. He is feeling guilty because his evidence has been twisted by the prosecution, making it look as though he alone is responsible for the death sentence, which he felt was unsafe. But the whole picture alters when another self-proclaimed widow checks-in at the same hotel...

Naturally it's all about recovering the loot, which finally does arrive through a most ingenious sub-plot, which we can't reveal. But Brown's good-scout act which ends the story is looking a little tame for the Sixties, which were just starting to take shape.

Busy "B" Director Eddie Cahn who was All Over the Map, Starting in 1931 with Dozens of "Shorts' , then Features Starting in 1942 Through 1962.

Cranking Out Second-Features Genre Hopping Like a Bunny Collecting Carrots.

Some Notable, Familiar Titles Found a way on His Filmography Through Attrition..."Destination Murder" (1952)..."Creature With the Atom Brain" (1955)..."The She Creature" (1956)..."Shake, Rattle, and Rock" (1956)..."Invasion of the Saucer Men" (1958)..."It the Terror From Beyond Space" (1958)..."Guns, Girls, and Gangsters" (1959),,,"Invisible Invaders" (1959)

Unfortunately All that Work is in Little Evidence in this Talky, Confined, Twisty, Tale of a Group of Uninteresting People who were in the Orbit of a "Hanged Man" who Stashed $160 Large, Before He was Executed for a Crime He Did Not Commit (don't ask).

It's Over-Written, Overplayed and Drawn-Out for 70 Min, the Final 10 or So Containing some "Movement" Beyond Bending Elbows and Ears.

The Only Familiar Face is "James Brown", seen as "Rusty's Pal" on the "Rin Tin Tin" TV Show.

It's Competent, somewhat Dramatic, but Stiff as a Board, and You May be too, Unless You're Not Looking for Anything Resembling a Film-Noir or a Pounding Suspenser.

It's too Much Like the Hundreds on the Tube at the Time

Maybe Worth a Watch, with the Lowest of Low Expectations.

Note...Except the "Babe in Bondage", nothing else on the poster appears in the Movie (OK the clock).

James Brown -- no, the other one -- is at Henry Corden's lodge near the state prison, where they're hanging a man on his testimony. Brown is an honest man, and his identification was not certain, and he said so. But it hanged the man, and now another has confessed. Brown meets Merry Anders, the dead man's widow at the lodge, who's looking for a clue towards $160,000 he stole from a bank.

It's a well written little thriller, with lots of sudden turns in the plot that kept me surprised. The problem is that it seems to have been shot on the cheapest of budgets, by Edward L. Cahn. Cahn was, in his long career, a competent journeyman; give him a good cast and he could turn out a good B picture. This one looks like it was shot for one of the television anthology series that flourished in the 1950s, without sufficient rehearsal time to modulate the performances. The result is a movie that probably played the drive-ins. Too bad. It could have been much more.