Danger Signal

I won't summarize the plot,as several others have done this already. Just two things: Yes,the ending seemed tacked on,like the writer couldn't think of a way to end the picture and just threw this together at the last minute. The other thing is that several posters are under the impression that Zachary Scott did Mildred Pierce first. No,this film came first,two years before Mildred Pierce,in fact. The Monty Berrigon character Scott played in that film is almost a carbon copy of the guy in this film,not the other way around. In fact,I wonder why Scott would agree to play the MP character since it was so close to this one. Maybe he wanted to work with Joan Crawford or maybe ,under the terms of his contract, he had to play anything they told him to. At any rate,he played these sleazy scoundrels well

An interesting commentary of the times is made when Mary Servoss remarks to her daughter Faye Emerson that with the housing shortage as it post World War 2 it was a patriotic duty to house folks if someone had a spare room. Faye poopoos the idea until the charming Zachary Scott comes along with limp and suitcase and tells Emerson that the limp was a 'souvenir of the South Pacific'. After that Scott is invited in. If Danger Signal were remade today a different reason would have to be found for Scott to gain access to home and hearth.

But that's Scott's business. He's one charming seducer of the female sex and would have a career playing such. When he gets their money he murders them.

He concentrates first on Emerson, but she's seen a bit too much of the world and then he focuses on younger sister Mona Freeman. But the police authorities are closing in so he has to work fast.

If this seems to borrow a bit from Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt, Danger Signal is a reasonaably good facsimile. It's a well cast bit of drama which could have used a more dramatic ending.

Still you'll find little to complain about.

Not the best of the genre, but a well-acted B-flick by a cast of great character actors.

The storyline is typical. -- It's the performances that make this fun to watch. Zachary Scott is type-cast as the slimy, shady, kill-for-profit "lady's man" type, played almost exactly as in the A-Films: "Mask of Demetrios" and "Mildred Pierce".

Faye Emerson, who often played bad girls in her lead-roles in B-Films, plays the good-girl here. - One who's first fooled by, then catches on-to, Scott's bad-boy character. She's lovely in a hard way, and handles her part like the pro that she was.

I enjoyed the supporting role played by Rosemary DeCamp, as a doctor with a slight European accent. After seeing this film, I've since read that doing foreign accents was a specialty of hers. Bruce Bennett (also playing a doctor) does nicely, as well.

The film's ending is expected, and slightly disappointing, but the talented cast, the film's tight script, and it's noirish atmosphere more than make up for that.

It's short, moves quick, and it's an enjoyable watch. I rated it 6.

Between the ages of 30 and 51, when he died of a brain tumour, Zachary Scott made 70 films. He was introduced in 1944 in Jean Negulesco's 'The Mask of Dimitrios', where he played Dimitrios. The next year, 1945, he made three films, of which this is one. He is best remembered by cineastes as the star of Jean Renoir's 'The Southerner', one of the 1945 films, where he had a sympathetic role. However, he often played creepy characters, and in this film he is a sociopathic killer of women for money. So what happens here? He lives in a house with three women, so watch out! Faye Emerson, who also appeared in 'Dimitrios', plays the older of two daughters in the house. She falls in love with Scott and they become secretly engaged. Then her 'cute kid' younger sister (played effectively by Mona Freeman, who resembles Bonita Granville both in looks and in behaviour) returns from boarding school and reveals casually in conversation with Scott that she has inherited a tidy sum, so Scott turns his sights on her instead, with all the torrid jealousies seething in the household which that was bound to arouse. Things get tense, and then they get tenser. Meanwhile, plans for murder are going forward in the mind of the calculating Scott. But it turns out that he is not the only one with such intentions. He is also being searched for as a result of his last kill, with which the film has opened, so that we know his back story. James Wong Howe gives effective noirish cinematography to this tale, which was directed by Frenchman Robert Florey who had moved to Hollywood some time earlier. The film is an effective psychopath-in-the-house mystery which can cause a bit of wear of the edges of some seats, for those of such an inclination.

Zachary Scott plays a womanizing writer who, as the film is opening, is removing a wedding ring from the finger of a woman who is lying in a bed in a hotel room. That she doesn't wake up tells you something. The story is fairly involved with minimal intrusion by law enforcement. It plays itself out between Scott and the woman he thinks will be his next push-over, an LA stenographer played by Faye Emmerson. While the audience is expecting the worst from Scott, it's Emmerson whose character eventually goes beyond what one would expect of it. Scott's traipsing around LA and looking for a room to rent is fairly riveting and when he sees Emmerson trying to take down the "Room For Rent" sign from her nice middle class two story wood house, the story is set. Suave ruthless womanizer meets lonely stenographer who lives with her mother and easily (maybe too easily) wins them both over. And later comes the arrival of the younger and prettier sister (Mona Freeman), which pretty much sets the stage and opens a lot of possibilities. Scott himself is at his ruthless best.