AMONG THE LIVING. Paramount, 1941. Albert Dekker, Susan Hayward, Harry Carey, Frances Farmer, Gordon Jones, Jean Phillips, Ernest Whitman. Director: Stuart Heisler. Shown at Cinevent 20, May 1988.

   Story: One of two identical twin brothers, mentally insane, has been hidden away from the world for twenty-five years. When he escapes, the good twin is blamed for the other’s crimes.

   This uneven but interesting film, directed by Stuart Heisler, also responsible for The Monster and the Girl (Paramount, 1941), begins with a marvelous tracking shot, traveling from a gloomy mansion to a graveside burial service.

   There are at least two other scenes in the film that are also visually exciting. In the more memorable, Albert Dekker, playing the psychotic twin of the good/bad pairing, is tracked by an overhead camera shooting at an angle as he pursues an increasingly frightened woman along dark, deserted, rain-glistening back streets.

   The camera-work is intermittently superb; the back-lot theatrics of this Southern Gothic thriller are something else again in spite of an interesting cast, with Dekker flanked by three attractive actresses, Susan Hayward, Jean Phillips and Frances Farmer, with Phillips particularly effective as the girl pursued by Dekker.

   The program notes, written by William Everson, characterized this appropriately as a “blend of film noir and horror,” but it’s the film noir elements that are the more arresting.