Fallguy

While driving home one night, Ed Dugan spots a car accident. When he goes to check up on the driver, the badly injured driver pulls a gun on him. He forces Dugan to drive him to local doctor Don Alderette, where he dies, after accusing the doctor of double-crossing him. Dugan is taken into custody by police chief Louis Gartner, but when he realizes Gartner is trying to use him as a fall guy by faking an accident, Dugan manages to escape. Soon Dugan finds out that Alderette, Gartner and local newspaper owner George Mitchell are the main guys behind a local crime syndicate.

There really isn't much to say. Most of the principal cast & crew members have a handful of credits on here if that, and it shows. Aside from the nicely done opening credits, obviously inspired by Saul Bass's work, and the 'hip' jazzy score the movie feels amateurish on almost every level. One-time actress Madeline Frances as the doctor's daughter is a welcome breath of fresh air, I actually enjoyed her performance. Then again, she had very little competition here, when at times some of the actors seem to have trouble remembering their lines.

I can forgive a lot of stuff for these low/no-budget movies. But there's just too much that needs forgiving here. The movie takes itself way too serious, which is its biggest crime. 'Fallguy' tries too hard to be better than it is. It's probably for the best that director Donn Harling produced and directed only one movie. Avoid. 4/10

Ed Dugan became a fixture on the early court TV series. This was his first and last film. Like many actors he gave in to drink, drugs and the "Hollywood" scene. His legacy is this film. This film illustrates the transformation of late 50's cop-u-drama mixed with a hint of the modern underworld. Most of the actors never became household names although Fabian as a cop is one interesting character. Film becomes interesting as the story progresses and the love/hate relationship blossoms between the lead actors. Some great scenes illustrating LA before the population explosion. If you like a script of predictable lines and cliché' this film is one to watch!

This is, obviously, a low budget movie with a fairly predictable "man on the run" plot. Leaving that aside ...

The opening credits are as good as anything Saul Bass did in the wake of "Anatomy of a Murder."

The jazz score is wonderful, and it is not the composer's fault that the director chose to turn up the volume so high that it becomes intrusive at times and even overrides the dialogue. There is a proto-Peter-Gunn feel to it that is really better than this film deserves.

There are some nice location shots around Los Angeles, and the scenes of the teens dancing at the hamburger joint are almost documentary-like in their naturalness.

Nice cars! Nice bus! Nice short-bed newspaper delivery truck! The hot little convertible and the young male lead give the whole affair the air of an episode of "77 Sunset Strip."

The director seems to come from a planet where people's faces are not important but their shoes, legs, and waists are. Shot after shot is deliberately set up to scope out men's shoes and trousers. The result is almost fetishistic, but, weirdly enough, kind of "manly" at the same time.

The bizarre angle shots in the sterile modern rooms look forward to the 1965 French New Wave Science Fiction / Film Noir cult classic "Alphaville" by Jean-Luc Godard -- only not ironic.

The sleazy exploitation subplot, including underwear-clad escorts, a ridiculous cat-fight, men slapping women around and roughing them up, and multiple negligee scenes, are spectacular examples of what happens when a demented director tries to interject a bevy of pretty young "blonde models" with no acting experience into a noirish crime drama.

Some of the actors are wooden and many of the interior scenes were badly miked, so there are unexpected echoes. and the resultant efforts to correct these deficiencies with overdubbing are failures. So what? Who cares?

The build-up of violence has an early Coen Brothers feel to it, somewhere between "Blood Simple" and "Miller's Crossing," only without their great dialogue. In fact, there is very little dialogue in this film at all, and some of what there is seems improvised.

The ending is completely over the top and veers off into Quentin Tarantino territory, and the denouement is a sweet heartbreaker, and entirely unexpected.

I gave this movie a solid "7" because i think it should be shown to all aspiring film-makers. It is a fascinating study in good intentions that do not quite make it to a professional level. It is not a travesty, like an Ed Wood film, but it is just enough below the threshold of what you are expecting that you wish Raymond Burr, Frank Cady, Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, and Sterling Hayden had been in the cast, and that the director had been Edgar G. Ulmer.

This obscurity is one of the stream of grungy B-movies with boisterous jazz scores and snazzy credit sequences that followed in the wake of iconoclastic A-pix like "Anatomy of a Murder" and "The Man with the Golden Arm". The credits, with a twisting, falling cut-out silhouette, are a pretty cool Saul Bass imitation, and the main title appears abruptly at the very end of the picture.

The story concerns a hot-shot teen who stumbles onto a mob execution in progress. The gangsters conveniently set him up as the fall guy. He spends most of the picture on the run from both the cops and a brutish hit man called "the Indian" while he tries to unravel the plot against him.

This seems to be a one-off independent production and the low budget shows. The sets are minimal (several scenes look like they were filmed in someone's basement), the low-key lighting harsh, and the day-for-night photography and post-sync dubbing are too obvious. Nonetheless, the filmmakers are canny enough to make this a very watchable film. The throbbing score and quick cutting keep up the pace, the acting is edgy and believable, and there's a good sense of visual composition with noirish shadows. Best of all, the story throws something sensational at us every ten minutes (my favorite bit being a cat-fight that breaks out incongruously in the middle of a mob sit-down).

It doesn't have the resonance of "Blast of Silence" or "Angel's Flight", but taken on its own terms, it's much more successful than one would expect.

This film was being shown on a specialty TV channel named "Drive-In" that plays obscure B movies. Right away, the low "production values", i.e. the money spent on sets and location, became apparent, so much so it reminded me of a 1940s era episode of a serial like Space Gordon.

True to it's B movie stature, there are obvious flaws, primarily the "wooden" performances. Occasionally, the actors' dialog would hesitate as if the next line of the script was forgotten. Some of the acting was altogether unbelievable, bordering on the ridiculous. For example, in a scene toward the end of the movie, the lead actor was slapped across the face with a left hand, but his head spun to the right so that he would fall through a doorway and down a flight of stairs! Was a director on the set?

I suppose this movie with it's dim lighting was attempting to be a "film noir" of some variety. But no matter what the genre, the film seemed too dark and shadowy, at least as it appeared on my TV. After awhile, a daylight scene came as a relief! Finally I found the abrupt and otherwise amateurish scene transitions and loud jazzy score intrusive. So much so they were not only distracting, they competed with the plot for interest. As the film skipped along, it became fascinating to see what laughable scene the movie would stumble into next. The movie suddenly ends with no credits, just the film title!

As much as I thought I could make an amateur movie that would compare favorably, the movie had enough merits to hold my interest. And even seem likable. The plot, such as it is, does move quickly, the culture of the late '50s and early '60s was fascinating and you couldn't predict how the next plot twist, or yet another incongruous exchange of dialog, would unfold. So in the end, I found I couldn't take my eyes off it!