THE ANATOMIST. Made for British TV: A Towers of London Production, 06 February 1956. Televised as part of the series ITV Play of the Week. US release, 1961.Alastair Sim, George Cole, Adrienne Corri, Jill Bennett and Michael Ripper. Written by James Bridie (play) and Harry Alan Towers. Directed by Dennis Vance.

   Perhaps the oddest film ever made about the Burke and Hare thing. Which is not to say it’s any good; this is, in fact, a rather dullish film about body-snatching, murder, riots and young love — but there’s no denying it’s a strange one.

   We open in a stylish drawing room where medical student George Cole (Alastair Sims’ perennial side-kick) is explaining to fiancée Jill Bennett why he has to stay in Edinburgh and study under the great Dr. Knox, instead of setting up practice and marrying her. In due course Dr Knox himself appears, played by Mr Sim himself (surprise!) and a lively discussion ensues about the merits of medicine and marriage.

   It’s refreshingly outré to see the redoubtable Alastair Sim turn his comic gifts to serious, borderline-sinister effect, but the novelty wears off as the characters keep talking… and talking… and talking… and…

   You get the point? The writers and director keep everyone wandering around one crummy set throwing dialogue at each other for about 15 or 20 minutes that seem much longer. Finally though, we get out of the drawing room and into a sleazy pub, where Burke and Hare (Hare is played by Michael Ripper, who would soon become a regular in Hammer films) start cozening a lady of easy virtue and ill repute (Adrienne Corri) plying her with strong drink and sweet words. And more words… and more words… and more….

   Suffice it to say that by the time they got her out of there, I was ready for any sort of action, though I would have preferred that mayhem be committed on the makers of this thing.

   And so it goes. Cole recognizes Ms. Corri’s corpse in Sim’s lecture hall and they discuss the matter till it’s talked to death. The scene shifts (restlessly) back to Bennett’s drawing room where someone tells us about Burke’s trial and the ensuing riots, just in time for the remainder of the cast to debate the proprieties of the situation. And then…

   Well, dull as it is, I’m not going to give away the ending of this thing except to say it was a merciful release and even a bit of a surprise, not that I cared much by that point. The Anatomist takes an unusual view of the whole body-snatching business (though to be strictly accurate, neither Burke nor Hare ever snatched any bodies) and it’s always a pleasure to see Alastair Sim strut his stuff.

   But I would have preferred less strutting and more movement.

THE ARNELO AFFAIR. MGM, 1947. John Hodiak, George Murphy, Frances Gifford, Dean Stockwell, Eve Arden, Warner Anderson. Screenwriter/director: Arch Oboler.

   Perhaps you’ve never had occasion to watch The Arnelo Affair. Consider yourself one of the lucky ones. For despite the potentially interesting premise – a suburban Chicago housewife named Anne Parkson (Frances Gifford) gets caught up in a romantic entanglement with a sleazy nightclub owner named Tony Arnelo (Hodiak) – this movie is far more of a tedious soap opera than it is a crime film.

   Let me be perfectly honest. The melodramatic acting, the incessant and overwrought soundtrack, and the truly dismal dialogue made this one a tough one for me to get through.

   Directed by Arch Oboler, who was known primarily for his work in radio, The Arnelo Affair is a flat, lifeless composition that offers little in the way of distinguished direction or photography.

   That’s not to say that Oboler didn’t have talent on hand. John Hodiak was a terrific actor, and he did his best with what he had to work with, but it wasn’t nearly enough to make his performance as the eponymous Tony Arnelo anything particularly memorable.

   The one small bright spot in this rather tepid affair is the presence of Warner Anderson as a police detective tasked with solving the murder of an actress. His trail leads him directing to both Arnelo and to Anne and her boring-as-dirt lawyer husband (George Murphy). Convincing in this role, Anderson gives a little bit of gritty reality and gravitas to the soap opera proceedings.

THE INTERNECINE PROJECT. Allied Artists, 1974. James Coburn, Lee Grant, Harry Andrews, Ian Hendry, Michael Jayston , Christiane Krüger, Keenan Wynn. Screenplay by Barry Levinson & Jonathan Lynn, based on the novel Internecine by Mort W. Elkind. Director: Ken Hughes.

   The dictionary definition of the word “internecine” is “mutually destructive,” and as a description of what this movie is all about, it’s as an appropriate a word as I can think of. Based on the short amount of time I spent watching an interview with screenwriter Jonathan Lynn provided on the DVD of the film, the word is pronounced something like “in TERN neh seen,” and if you let it, it’s a word that will get stuck in your head all day long without being able to find a way to get out.

   Also, before going any further, I’d like to mention that the novel the movie is supposedly based on, the one by Mort Elkind that’s stated in the credits, it doesn’t seem to exist. One of those anomalies of the film-making world that pops up every now and again, I imagine, and I no longer worry about such things.

   So, where does the “mutual destruction” come in? It seems that what James Coburn, a high profile (and highly photogenic) professor of economics, wants more than anything else, is an appointment to a high government position. Rather than go through an embarrassing set of revelations in any confirmation hearings, he decides to clean up his past. That is to say, four most inconvenient former associates, unknown to each other, in some previous undesirable activities.

   How? By setting each one a final task, that of killing off another one of the four. By an overdose of insulin, by death in a shower (someone must have seen Psycho), by a high tech electronic frequency transmitter, and last but not least, a stout clunk on the head, simple but always effective.

   The timing of these four simultaneous assassinations is crucial, and so the movie plays out like a well-planned “heist” film, one in which if one step goes awry, the whole affair may fall apart quickly and immediately.

   Twists and turns are expected, therefore, but alas, even though James Coburn’s character spends a lot of time pacing as he waits for the phone to ring at appropriate intervals from each of the participants he has sent into motion, there is only one twist that really counts, and you’ll have to wait to the ending for that.

   The photography is very well done, and Lee Grant, who plays a journalist as well as a former romantic interest, is as beautiful as ever. Every once in a while there also seems to be a point at which she is important to the plot, but sadly enough, that point never quite comes. According to what I read on IMDb, a number of people have liked this film, but if you were to ask me, I’d have to tell you I found it a misfire, more often than not.

THE ZODIAC KILLER. 1971. Hal Reed, Bob Jones, Ray Lynch, Tom Pittman, Mary Darrington, Frank Sanabek, Ed Quigley, Doodles Weaver (as Doddles Weaver). Director: Tom Hanson.

   This one’s an exercise in pure exploitation. Released in 1971 at the height of the hysteria surrounding the series of unsolved murders in northern California, the eponymous The Zodiac Killer is a low budget attempt to capitalize on the public’s well-founded fears that a brutal murderer might be lurking in their midst. Poorly edited and with acting that ranges from borderline adequate to the downright campy, The Zodiac Killer is not what anyone would call a good film.

   But it is a cultural artifact, to be sure. There’s something very gonzo about late 1960s and 1970s independent filmmaking, a gung ho spirit that sadly is lacking in filmmaking today.

   The tone of the film ranges from sleazy to brutal to hysterically funny, and it takes forever to figure out what the filmmakers actually intended their final product to be. Unless, that is, what they intended is what you see on the screen: a real mishmash that somehow tells a story about who they imagined the Zodiac killer might be.

   And that persona comes in the form of a mailman by the name of Jerry (Hal Reed). Jerry’s not a particularly happy person. His father lives in an insane asylum, and he gets yelled at by old ladies on his mail route – well, one old lady in particular. His only friend seems to be a pathetic, violently erratic truck driver. Somehow – and we never really learn how and why – he snaps and becomes a devotee of a religious cult and then begins his killing spree.

   There are some truly brutal murder scenes in this one, but also some scenes that are so over the top that they’re downright comical. Almost slapstick. A truly bizarre little movie that doesn’t say too much about anything but, if it ends up being screened as a midnight movie, has the potential to be a lost cult classic.

BIG HOUSE, U.S.A. Bel-Air/United Artists, 1955. Ralph Meeker, Broderick Crawford, Lon Chaney Jr, William Talman, Felicia Farr, Reed Hadley and Charles Bronson. Written by John C. Higgins. Directed by Howard W. Koch.

   Despite the title, this isn’t really a prison movie. It’s a film that could have been agreeably subversive, in the manner of Kiss Me Deadly, but instead it settles for being merely unpleasant.

   Ralph Meeker stars as Jerry Barker, who seems at first to be just a guy out for a walk in the woods who stops to help a lost child. But this is Ralph at his nastiest, in a role that makes his Mike Hammer look like Saint Francis by comparison.

   Things get disagreeable pretty quickly, and what seemed at first to be an act of kindness turns into extortion. Ralph almost comes out of those woods with $200,000 and a guilty secret. I won’t go into details, but it was all pretty grim, even for a seasoned old movie-watcher like me.

   I said Ralph “almost” comes out of the woods with the money. Turns out he hid most of it back in the timber (at Royal Gorge National Park, where most of this was filmed) and when he’s picked up he only has a few thousand on him — enough to get nailed for extortion and draw a one-to-five-year sentence; with good behavior he can expect to get out in a few months and go back to claim his loot.

   But things take an interesting turn when Ralph gets thrown in a cell full of cult-movie bad guys: Broderick Crawford, William Talman, Lon Chaney and Charles Bronson. And there’s another fun twist when Ralph’s cell-mates plan to bust out and take him with them… to lead them to his loot.

   Like I say, this could have been enjoyably loathsome — like The Lineup or The Killers (the 1964 remake) with a writer and director attuned to its noir potential. But the folks in charge here decided to go for a Dragnet-style approach; Reed Hadley comes on as an FBI agent, complete with voice-over narration, and everything gets filmed at arm’s-length, in a near-documentary style, but without the sense of gritty realism.

   Even the most harrowing moments — and there are quite a few here — are shot with a detachment that seems almost uncaring. And when everyone gets their comeuppance, we get no sense of things coming together or falling apart. All we get is the sad conviction that with this story hook and those actors, this could have been a lot better.

  DESIRE AND HELL AT SUNSET MOTEL. Two Moon Releasing, 1991. Sherilyn Fenn, Whip Hubley, David Hewlett, David Johansen, Kenneth Tobey. Screenwriter-director: Alien Castle.

   An unhappily married couple, a toy salesman and his bored wife, check into a 1950s hotel four miles from Disneyland. He hires a friend to spy on his wife; she asks her lover to kill her husband.

   This was described somewhere as “comedy noir,” but unless you have a high tolerance for ennui, forget it. It’s arch and snooty, and on a low budget in a cheap motel, that won’t even buy you a vanilla phosphate.

A KILLER WALKS. Grand National Pictures, British, 1952. Laurence Harvey, Laurence Naismith, Susan Shaw and no one else familiar to US viewers. Screenplay by Ronald Drake, from the play Gathering Storm by Gordon Glennon, based on the novel Envy My Simplicity by Reyner Barton. Directed by Ronald Drake.

   You probably never heard of this quota quickie, but if you come across it, you should give it a try. It offers all the usual flaws of a British-made-to-order cheapie: tinny sound, canned music and jaggy editing because they didn’t shoot enough film to cover things properly, but A Killer Walks has more redeeming qualities than any movie really needs.

   For one thing, it’s based on a play and a novel, which means (1) they had to pay someone for the rights, (2) the action is confined to a few simple sets, perfectly suited to economy measures, and (3) the characters and dialogue are handled rather neatly, and in this case by an able cast.

   Laurence Harvey stars as a man who has spent his life working on his grandmother’s farm, and resented every minute of it. Now I don’t know about you, but when I see him on the screen I find it hard to believe Laurence Harvey ever did an honest day’s work in his life, much less tilled the soil, but fortunately the makers of this thing keep him dressed in suit and tie, always just about to go out for a night on the town with his expensive girlfriend, so we don’t have to deal with the sight of him getting his hands dirty in gumboots & dungarees, which would have made the whole thing unbelievable.

   In fact, it quickly develops that Harvey doesn’t like farm labor any more than you’d think he would, and he’s about had it with having to take wages from his grandmother (Ethel Edwards) at a farm he stands to inherit whenever the old bat kicks off. He’s also losing patience with his younger brother (Trader Faulkner) who has some mental problems that seem to have got him into some vaguely-hinted trouble in the past.

   In due course the plot heads where we knew it would, with Larry murdering Gran and pinning it on his little brother, but Killer Walks gets there gracefully, gradually working up to the thing with evocative characterizations from Edwards and Faulkner. As for Harvey, there’s an excellent bit where he tells his brother that old people don’t really want to live anymore, skillfully written, and delivered with baleful relish delightful to behold.

   When the murder comes, it arrives with a bit of polish, probably the work of co-photographer Jack Asher, who defined the look of Hammer’s horror films a few years later with his stylish visuals. In this case he does it on the cheap, with a few odd angles and superimpositions that lend a nightmare feel to the homicide we knew was coming all along.

   The fun in these things, however, is always in watching things unravel; I mentioned somewhere before that we read detective stories to see things come together and crime films to see things fall apart, and in this case they do so in one brilliant scene between the two Laurences (Naismith & Harvey) perfectly written and performed. Suffice it to say that “a killer walks” is the title, not the coda, and things wrap up very neatly indeed.

THE GANG THAT COULDN’T SHOOT STRAIGHT. GM, 1971. Jerry Orbach, Leigh Taylor-Young, Jo Van Fleet, Lionel Stander, Robert De Niro. Based on the novel by Jimmy Breslin. Director: James Goldstone.

   Thanks to director James Goldstone’s frenetic pacing, there’s not a lot of down time in The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. In this comedy film, that’s not necessarily such a bad thing. Despite a fairly thin plot, this off-kilter satire of Brooklyn’s mafia wars moves from scene to scene at a rapid clip, not giving the viewer much time to digest what happened. Most of the time, it works well and distracts the viewer from the fact that there’s not whole much depth to the proceedings.

   But who needs much depth when you’ve got Jerry Orbach portraying Kid Sally, a low-rent South Brooklyn enforcer and Robert DeNiro portraying a character named Mario, an Italian bicycle racer turned con man? Both are such fine actors that it’s difficult to not get lost in their respective characters various schemes and machinations.

   Then there’s veteran character actor Lionel Stander, whose career was among the most effected by the Hollywood blacklist. He portrays Baccala, a crude, tough talking mafia don who utilizes his wife to start the ignition on his car. You know. Just in case.

   The plot follows two parallel tracks. Kid Sally’s attempts to rub out Baccala, and Kid Sally’s sister, Angela’s (Leigh Taylor-Young) budding romance with Mario. Eventually these tracks merge in Kid Sally’s hilariously incompetent attempt to kill Baccala in an Italian restaurant. In this scene, as in many others, the humor isn’t exactly subtle. But it’s not childish and infantile, either. The comedic talent on display makes The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight an enjoyable enough movie, but not necessarily one that necessitates a second viewing.

Editorial Note:   As coincidences go, this is a sad one. This review was scheduled yesterday for today. This morning Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jimmy Breslin’s death was reported. He was 88.

THE DROP. Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2014. Tom Hardy, Noomi Rapace, James Gandolfini, Matthias Schoenaerts, John Ortiz, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Michael Aronov. Based on the 2009 short story “Animal Rescue” by Dennis Lehane, who later expanded it into a novel titled The Drop (2014). Director: Michaël R. Roskam.

   It may be somewhat odd to begin a movie review with a brief allusion to the movie’s ending. But there’s a line spoken by one of the secondary characters at the tail end of The Drop that basically sums up the whole film. I’m not going to tell you who it is, of course, or what he says. Trust me when I tell you that it’s one of those lines, so rare in commercial cinema today, that makes you sit up and take notice.

   How perfect a line it is and one that goes a long way in distilling a complex, multifaceted film about two cousins running a small criminal enterprise out of their bar in working class Brooklyn. Cousin Marv (the late James Gandolfini) and his younger cousin Bob Saginowski (a perfectly cast Tom Hardy) are getting by, but are hardly living the high life. Years ago, Marv was forced to sell his establishment to Chechen gangsters. It’s something he’s never quite gotten over. Bob, on the other hand, seems to be perfectly fine with living a quiet, uneventful life as the bartender.

   In exquisite noir, or should I say neo-noir, fashion, the plot unfolds due to a series of coincidences, near coincidences, and bad luck.

   There are actually four separate strands to the compellingly bleak story that is The Drop. The first involves a plot hatched by Marv to steal from his own bar – technically, the bar owned by Chechen gangsters – in order to have money to keep his father on life support. The second concerns Bob’s interactions with a detective that he recognizes from church. The third revolves around the mystery surrounding the disappearance of a bar regular some years ago. The fourth story, and as it turns out the movie’s linchpin, concerns the budding romance between Bob and a local girl (Noomi Rapace). A romance, it should be noted, that begins when Bob discovers a beaten, abandoned dog in a garbage can in front of her home.

   It admittedly takes patience to watch and wait, as the story doesn’t unfold quickly. Rather the movie operates like a slow burner, amplifying the heat and the tension without the viewer exactly realizing what’s happening until it’s too late. There’s a big reveal in the end of the film, one in which the infamous line that I referenced at the beginning of this review is intimately tied to, but it’s also fun to watch everything leading up to that point.

   The cast is uniformly excellent and the movie doesn’t dumb things down for a mass audience. This is a sophisticated crime drama, one as much about characters and their personal journeys as much as about the crimes themselves.

HIGH SCHOOL HELLCATS. American International Pictures, 1958. Yvonne Lime, Bret Halsey, Jana Lund, Suzanne Sydney, Heather Ames, Nancy Kilgas, Rhoda Williams. Director: Edward Bernds.

   With a film title like High School Hellcats, you know you’re almost certainly in for a movie that is more exploitation than artistic. Did I mention it’s an American International Pictures production? They more or less had a corner on the teen and juvenile delinquent low budget market back in the 1950s. This particular product – er, film — is true to form. It’s got wild teenagers doing bad things, worried and strict parents who just don’t understand the younger generation, and a misbegotten romantic couple struggling to make things work despite the chaos that surrounds them.

   What makes this particular story different from many of the similar juvenile delinquent and hot rod movies churned out at the time is that the focus is on a female gang. You read that right. The leader of the gang may be mean, but her lieutenant is downright sadistic.

   When innocent, but rebellious Joyce Martin (Yvonne Lime) shows up at her new school, it doesn’t take long for her to be bullied by the Hellcats. Soon enough, she’s joining their ranks at a late night initiation ceremony at an abandoned movie theater. It doesn’t take long, however, for Joyce’s romantic life to be strained by her membership in the Hellcats. When the gang’s leader dies under mysterious circumstances, Joyce realizes that she has signed up for more than she has bargained for.