CAGE OF EVIL. United Artists, 1960. Ronald Foster, Pat Blair, Harp McGuire, John Maxwell, Preston Hanson, Helen Kleeb, plus uncredited: Eve Brent, Henry Darrow, Ted Knight. Director: Edward L. Cahn.

       Mostly a play-it-by-the-numbers crime film, with a largely lackluster cast, cheap sets, and no more than workmanlike camera work and direction – all of the ingredients of a mediocre movie, in other words. And yet, in spite of all the odds against it, the movie did manage to keep me watching the whole way through, and these days of abandoning movies quickly on my part, that has to mean something.

       Part of it may have to do with the fact that no matter how much star power the cast may have been lacking, they were all pros at the business they were in, which was telling a story both clearly and cleanly. In perhaps his only leading role in a film, Ronald Foster plays a police detective who keeps getting passed over for promotion, mostly for being very bad at the PR end of things. (He starts slugging possible witnesses when they don’t speak up right away.)

     So it comes as no surprise when he’s assigned to get close to the girl friend (the rather statuesque Patricia Blair) of the hood who’s suspected of pulling off a jewel robbery, we already know one major route the story is going to take. Nor are we wrong.

     Nor, of course, do things go well for the two of them, in true noir fashion. Even though you know what’s coming. what’s still a certain amount of fun is seeing it happen, and just how.