The Glass Cage

This is a very Noir-ish mystery with some great experimental cinematography about two detectives trying to solve the murder of a local, what looks like a Bunker Hill neighborhood business man. A nightmare sequence features the iconic (for Film Noir) Bradley Building in LA.

I was pleasantly surprised, the film was produced by Futuramic Productions whose only other efforts were Squad Car (1960) and Come Spy with Me (1967). Arlene Sax plays a beautiful but troubled woman living in a low rent rooming house who thinks she shot the intruder. A beatnik artist is the only witness. Sax, later known as Arlene Martel, was a staple of 50s-60s TV. A 7/10 worth a watch for Sax/Martel fans. If you were alive in the 60s and watching TV she did many guest shots.

This is a very strange and refreshingly offbeat film noir made on a shoestring. It features Arlene Martel (then called Arline Sax) playing two sisters, named Ellen and Ruth. Although she had been appearing in TV series for six years before this film was made, this was her first feature film. She manages to create two bizarre and fascinating characters. The film is not made in a conventional manner. The two policemen investigating the murder do not have the usual cop-mates relationship, and are quirky, with bizarre outbursts and lengthy reflective pauses and silences. The dialogue is fresh. The film avoids being a standard cop drama and has some unusual psychological aspects. Elisha Cook Jr. Plays the girls' authoritarian father, and there appears to be something sinister about what he may have done to the girls when young to make them the way they are. John Hoyt plays the thoughtful older detective, who is always stopping to ponder things, and the tempestuous younger detective who falls for the girl Ellen is played by Bob Kelijan. He is always over-reacting, and I might say also sometimes over-acting as well. At one point in the film all the moving action stops and we have a sequence of dramatic stills, evidently taken from the action. I don't know whether this is a device of the director or whether they lost some cans of film or what. It seems clear that those scenes were indeed filmed, and so we must suppose that the director substituted the stills for emotional effect. Or maybe he was ordered to cut the film down, and rather than lose a chunk of the story, he showed it in abbreviated form as stills to save five minutes of time. I presume we will never know the answer to that. Anyway, it works despite the unexpected nature of it. The director was Antonio Santean, and he and John Hoyt wrote the script. It was the only feature film Santean ever directed, though he later wrote three others. He was born in Argentina in 1936, and died in 2014. There must be a story there somewhere, but we will probably never know that either. Much of the cinematography is unusual and experimental. The film features several characters who are psychologically disturbed, and one outrageous example is a mad artist played by King Moody who smashes up his studio when upset. You might say the entire film was psychologically disturbed, but in a nice way. It is well worth seeing for those interested in unusual variations of film noir and early independent American cinema.

This is one of those little-known but marvelous low-budget wonders that occasionally surfaces. The shoestring budget doesn't detract from the experimental camera work and story telling. Even if you predict the surprise ending, you're in for a great ride as the police detectives investigate an unusually troubled young woman and her older sister. The film boasts some of the most experimental set pieces attempted in the early sixties.

It may not be a complete success, but this semi-experimental murder mystery is well worth checking out. The fragmentarily-edited opening scene of the killing of a prowler signals that the filmmakers won't be telling this tale in straightforward fashion. Instead they use a constant parade of off-kilter angles, Freudian dream and point-of-view sequences, jagged cutting and bizarre settings, along with existential dialog, to paint their lonely abstract world.

The film fits into that sub-genre of thrillers/melodramas of the late 50s/early 60s involving psychologically damaged protagonists, with touches of the "Dementia"-style avant-garde. On the down side, much of the method-style emoting is over the top, the key to the mystery is telegraphed a bit too obviously, and the score is disappointingly melodramatic (plus, the boom mike makes many unfortunate appearances at the edges of the frame). But there's a fine cast of eccentrics, most notably Elisha Cook Jr. as the protagonist's creepy evangelist father, and ever-loony King Moody (channelling Timothy Carey) as a voyeuristic/exhibitionist conceptual artist who really can't handle rejection. As in "Blade Runner" and Joseph Losey's "M", L.A.'s Bradbury Building makes a welcome, surrealistic appearance in one of the dream sequences. And you won't believe where the climactic stand-off takes place. The title may be an homage to "The Glass Menagerie", but reminds me more of "Ride the Pink Horse". Save this one for 2:00 in the morning.