L'otage du gang

As this film, Hot Summer Night, was made in 1957, there are a lot of familiar faces in it who had success in television: Leslie Nielsen, Paul Richards, Edward Andrews, Claude Aikens, and Jay C. Flippen.

Most of the actors were quite prolific and enjoyed long careers as character actors. Nielsen's career spanned over sixty years, and he lived long enough to re-invent himself in comic roles and start a new career.

The story concerns honeymooners, the Partains (Nielsen and Colleen Miller), who are staying at a cabin near a small town. Bill Partain has been fired from his newspaper, and he gets wind of a big story that could win him his job back.

A well-known thief, Tom Ellis (Robert Wilke), has struck again, and a bank employee was killed. He's hiding out nearby. No one in the town wants to help Partain find Ellis or his wife Ruth, who lives separately from him, because it's a poor town and Ellis has helped many of them for a long time.

When Partain finally finds Ellis and interviews him, the actions of one of Ellis' psycho partners (Richards) make Partain a hostage.

This isn't a bad B movie. As a B movie made in black and white, it does have a TV feel to it. Richards handles a showy role well. Colleen Miller, who plays Nielsen's wife, had a difficult role; the wife was sort of a pain. The attractive Miller retired a year later when she married Ted Briskin, a wealthy man previous married to Betty Hutton.

Worth watching for the young Nielsen, and if you're my age, the actors will bring back memories for you.

Newlyweds Leslie Nielsen and Colleen Miller are traveling through the Ozarks in search of a story. He's a recently laid off reporter and what he's looking for is an interview with a John Dillinger like criminal who is from there and is a local legend. And the town is very protective f that legend.

It takes a while but Nielsen finds the legend played by Robert Wilke. He gets his interview. But quite suddenly Nielsen becomes the story.

A lot of familiar character players turn in some top drawer performances. No stars in this film give it a nice authentic ring. if I had to choose one it would be Paul Richards ho made a career of playing deranged individuals. Richards may have got a career role here.

No frills for ts B film, but a great cast and story.

A very late entry in the film noir cycle--and a small-town noir at that!--HOT SUMMER NIGHT is well-done in just about every way. Except for a few awkward dialogue passages between Leslie Nielsen and Colleen Miller in the man-wife scenes (a small part of the film), the film combines the best qualities of BAD DAY AT BLACK ROCK (outsider comes into hostile, secretive small town and is rejected) and PETRIFIED FOREST ("regular" characters held hostage by philosophizing criminals delivering stage-like soliloquies). The film also has multiple levels of social commentary, is full of unexpected and even shocking brief spurts of violence that send the plot in unexpected directions, and is acted perfectly by virtually every supporting actor in the cast. Each character (except for the wife) is three-dimensional and complex and somewhat contradictory...just like real people! Younger viewers might be surprised to see Leslie Nielsen strutting around in a t-shirt and acting like a tough guy, but he does it convincingly and his character--a newspaperman specializing in crime stories--would need to be able to turn the tough-guy persona on when he dealt with criminals in his work. Among the supporting players, Paul Richards is fantastic as the psycho Elly, a role that may have gone to Montgomery Clift or James Dean in a bigger-budgeted film. Richards, who has a huge body of television work, passed away in 1974, but I'm anxious to seek out his work as he is a major talent. James Best also gives one of his finest-ever dramatic performances here as Kermit, the abrasive punk who is far more complex than he seems to be when we first meet him as he assaults Leslie Nielsen in a bar. The soundtrack by Andre Previn is so good, I wish I could buy a copy. There's lots of fine sax-driven rock'n'roll in the bar sequences, and the piano trio material (presumably played by Previn himself) is worthy of being released as a jazz album. The film goes in a completely unexpected direction at the mid-point, and even the climax, though not entirely unexpected, had me on the edge of my seat. As a study of the nature of crime and the nature of small-town society, or as an entertaining 1950s crime film, HOT SUMMER NIGHT is one of those studio b-movies that is so much better than it needed to be--everyone involved with it clearly wanted to make something special and memorable even though working in an assembly-line studio format, and they succeeded admirably. Don't miss it the next time it plays on TCM.

Unusual. Despite pacing problems and pockets of clumsy dialogue, it has some good insights into the criminal mind as well as the minds of those who feel the need to mythologize outlaws that literally get away with murder. It's bolstered by a wise, unsentimental performance from Jay C. Flippen as a hard-nosed con rolling the dice one last time, and Paul Richards' strange turn as a neurotic, scarily unpredictable gunman. (He is involved in a bizarre, never-saw-it-coming act of violence about half way in that really gets your attention - to put it mildly.) Leslie Nielsen is fine as the out of work newspaperman desperate for a good story, but Colleen Miller is barely adequate as his new bride. You never buy that she would marry someone without a job, nor can you accept his decision to stir things up with the locals on their honeymoon so soon, especially in her presence. She comes across as mystifyingly accepting of the situation, and at times seems to be in some kind of a trance-like state.

But its strengths outweigh its flaws. The script is gutty and resourceful and the director, David Friedkin, creates a sense of real isolation, a feeling that this small, dingy town isn't so much a whole different planet as much as it is a kind of black hole. If you ever get caught in it, you can be sure you'll have a devil of a time getting out. Good suspense and an exciting finish. Always fun to uncover curious little efforts like this. Definite cult possibilities.

Tom Ellis and his murderous bank robbery crew have their hideout in rural Ozarks. Newspaper reporter Bill Partain (Leslie Nielsen) and his wife are on their honeymoon in a nearby cabin. He's in between jobs after a newspaper merger. When he gets a tip on the robbers, he decides to investigate but finds the locals less than welcoming.

It's interesting to see Leslie Nielsen as the young leading man. He has a stoic sincerity to his performance but he has trouble showing fear. That's the missing element which keeps the tension at a lower level. He doesn't feel like he's in danger despite the fact that his character is definitely in danger. All in all, this is an interesting little noir.