The Guilty

Another good film about twins from 1947 – the other being "Dual Alibi" starring Herbert Lom. In this offering, Bonita Granville plays both the good and the bad sister. One of them is murdered and it's up to Inspector Regis Toomey to get to the truth. Ex-soldier Don Castle (Mike) also does some investigating of his own.

There is a small cast in this offering and so you may suspect the guilty party at some point. However, this story is clever and does provide you with extra twists and turns at the end. The film is short and basically, it fooled me.

Twins always seem to be trouble whenever they pop up in films!

In 1946, Olivia De Havilland donned monogram brooches and identity necklaces to take the dual role of good and bad twins Ruth and Terry in Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror. The following year Bonita Granville followed suit, as good and bad twins Linda and Estelle, in Monogram's sub-basement adaptation of a Cornell Woolrich story. Of the two, The Guilty is the creepier, more haunting movie, taking a place of dubious honor amid the nether reaches of film noir.

Mustachioed Don Castle shares his walk-up flat with his superior from army days, Wally Cassel, who's a little unstable owing to a head injury sustained in combat. They're involved in a complicated foursome with the twins; when one of the fellows breaks up with one of the girls, the other takes up with the ditched sister. But the insanely jealous Estelle keeps playing one guy off the other; she wants both and her sister to have neither. One night Linda disappears; later her body is found on a rooftop, in a barrel of gravel (she was too big to shove down the incinerator shaft). Police investigator Regis Toomey encounters a baffling maze of alibis and false clues (Castle is on the hunt as well), until the movie ends with climaxes within climaxes.

All this takes place in but three sleazy sets: The men's apartment; that of the twins, their mother and a long-time boarder (John Litel); and a corner bar from which most of the story is narrated in flashback. A few forays into the dark, deserted streets only enhance the claustrophobia, the obsessiveness of Woolrich's nightmare vision. (And his obsessive fiction reuses the same themes and gambits over and over; there are parallels here to the same year's The Fall Guy, which resembles The Black Angel, which...).

Granville, of course, will ever be the screen embodiment of Nancy Drew, from the four programmers she starred in as the teenaged sleuth during the late '30s. Her career started to sputter in the next decade; for one thing her girlish exuberance didn't blossom into womanly glamor. But she developed a tough, no-nonsense, very-'40s face (not unlike Ann Savage's). Her noir appearances were limited to a small (but meaty) role in The Glass Key and a leading one in the low-budget Suspense. It's a shame, because grew up into quite a good bad girl.

Don Castle is sharing a cheap room with his ex-lieutenant from the army, Wally Cassell. Castle is studying on the G. I. Bill. Cassell drinks a lot. Each is dating Bonita Granville, but it's all right, since she's twins in this movie. One is nice, the other is nasty. Then the nice one gets murdered, and detective Regis Toomey is on the case.

This being derived from a Cornell Woolrich story, it's surprising the guys aren't twins also; it would have saved on actors' salaries, although the process shots might have eaten up the difference. Miss Granville -- soon to become the wife of Jack Wrather, the producer of this movie -- is doubled by showing the back of another actress, or having her voice come from offscreen.

Of course, many odd possibilities arose in my mind. Did one sister kill the other, and then masquerade as the victim? What is John Litel doing in the cast? I started out confused, and even after the ending, I was still confused, because this was directed by John Reinhardt, who liked to throw in every film noir trope whether it should be there or not. Always watchable for the sake of Woolrich's sick symbolism, it's not one of the best noirs I've seen.

Both somewhat dull and weirdly fascinating, the flick starts with a long voiceover and lengthier flashback to explain how two army buddies, later roommates, (one incapacitated by PTSD, the other attending night school to better himself) get mixed up with a pair of twin sisters of opposite character (Bonita Granville). When one of them suddenly disappears, the investigation begins. Don Castle plays the straight upstanding veteran beside Wally Cassell's nervous wreck, and the two find ways to ward off a cloud of suspicion over their possible involvement in the disappearance. This is a rough-and-ready B movie but all the more authentic for that. Shot entirely in the gloom of night, it's dreary, rain-soaked and confined to about three locations - but the strange relationship between the ex-soldiers and the twins keeps one engaged, as does the whodunnit aspect, which turns out to be overly convoluted. A palpable sense of ennui, existential angst and cynicism runs through the film which, with some excellent use of shadow and light, elevate this low-budget Monogram movie into something very watchable. There's plenty to like here.

(1947) The Guilty MYSTERY CRIME DRAMA

Adapted from Cornell Woolrich short story "Two Men in a Furnished Room" from "Detective Fiction Weekly" with the narrator Mike Carr (Don Castle) narrating both the story and the events when one of the 2 twin sisters (Linda to be exact), both played by Bonita Granville is murdered all pointing to her spouse, Johnny Dixon (Wally Cassell)as the guilty suspect evading the police. And of course, the surviving twin, Estelle Mitchell helps Mike Carr since him and Johnny used to serve one another get involve into uncovering the murder. A moderate entertaining thriller that keeps viewers guessing until the very end.