The Mugger

Less noir and more procedural crime caper. This one puts a consulting psychiatrist in charge of profiling and leading the investigation of a serial mugger who is terrorizing women and slashing their face. Those who remember Quincy MD will remember why these were compelling stories told from another angle. Deserves a better reputation.

THE MUGGER is about a prolific purse snatcher who always leaves his female victims with a signature wound.

The police are baffled.

Enter police psychiatrist, Dr. Pete Graham (Kent Smith), who attempts to discern the motivations behind the crimes, while the title maniac strikes again and again, causing the same injury.

What message is this person sending through this terrible trademark?

Death ensues.

This is an enjoyable crime thriller. In spite of it's being fairly predictable, the final confrontation / revelation is exciting and worth the wait. Kent is very good in his role, but it's Nan Martin who is the most interesting, as Graham's fiancee, Policewoman Claire Townsend.

Co-stars the ever-dependable James Franciscus...

There's a guy going around attacking women late at night, slashing their faces and their handbags. Police psychiatrist Kent Smith catches the case.

It's based on an Evan Hunter novel, his second 87th Precinct novel writen under his Ed McBain pen name. It's a slow procedural, but Kent Smith's calm presence and the expanding circle of characters and the suddenness of the clue revealing whodunnit make it less than a perfect mystery. Still, the shooting in actual New York City locations makes it worthwhile, as does the cast, including Dick O'Neill, James Franciscus, and Renee Taylor.

William Berke's last directorial effort is obviously a cheap affair, and half the characters sound like they've taken elocution lessons from Sheldon Leonard, but there are visual sparks in the movie, particularly the sequence that starts in a Turkish bath and ends with Smith and suspect Arthur Storch running from a crap game. Berke's career wasn't going anywhere in particular when he died at the age of 55 the year of this release. He'd started out in B westerns, and had never gotten an A budget in a quarter of a century, but he liked to give the audience some value for money.

Police psychiatrist Kent Smith is an easy-going, amiable guy, ready to take time from his pursuit of a sunglassed mugger to act as unofficial therapist to easy-going, amiable hack driver James Franciscus (whose wife's sister, living with them, has become withdrawn and hostile). But the mugger has struck 11 times in eight weeks, grabbing women's purses and leaving a superficial knife scar along their jawlines. With the help of his fiancée, policewoman Nan Martin, Kent follows up a number of leads, all of them dead ends. Then the mugger strikes once more, but this time leaves his victim dead - Franciscus' sister-in-law, whom an autopsy reveals to have been three months pregnant....

Part of the pleasure of Ed McBain's seemingly endless series of police procedurals set in the 87th Precinct is that he takes the bizarre and the pathological and makes them mundane - part of the warp and weft of living in a city. The second of his novels to be filmed, The Mugger leeches much of the familiarity away; it ill-advisedly dispenses with the quirky cops of the 87th to center on Smith, a character so four-square that McBain would never have written him.

And though his books may seem garrulous and absent-minded, underneath the disgressions clockwork plots tick away. But in The Mugger, the red herrings really stink. Few adaptations of McBain's series, for the movies or for television, have been quite successful in fidelity to the author's nameless city and the cops who police it, but The Mugger must count among the weakest of them - an inferior follow-up to the same year's Cop Hater.

"The Mugger" is a low-budget sleeper of a cop film from the late 1950s--the tail end of the American film-noir era. While the film doesn't have any major stars, the story is VERY modern for 1958 and might surprise you. Plus, it's a dandy little story about police profilers and a nasty case that's got everyone stumped.

Kent Smith was a very reliable actor who mostly was a supporting actor and star in Bs. In this film, he plays the lead, a police psychiatrist that's been called in to deal with a strange series of attacks. They involve women who were mugged and then slashed on the left side of the face--not a deep slash, but serious nevertheless. His job is to help determine what sort of guy would do this--the profile of what they should be looking for in the case. The story is compact, very interesting, takes a few nice detours to throw the audience off the scent and gets even more interesting when there is a murder. I'd say more but I don't want to give away the plot.

There were many good reasons I enjoyed the film--most of which boil down to dandy writing. The dialog was very snappy, there were some funny little touches (such as the blonde victim who REALLY liked Smith) and the film's not beating around the bush too much in discussing crime. You'll hear words like 'rape' and 'sexual attack' in the film and there is also a bit about a pregnant woman--stuff that the more permissive 50s films STILL rarely ever discussed but which made the movie much more realistic. I also enjoyed some of the supporting players--such as the way the policewoman handled herself in the park. Well worth seeing and a nice opportunity for Smith to show he was a very good actor with a likable style. The only negative at all I noticed was the confrontation scene at the end--who would confront a killer while the killer is driving the car?! Talk about a recipe for disaster! Oh, and the best line in the film: "Is he a friend of yours? He's in little pieces now".