They Made Me a Killer

Satisfying noir B-feature that does everything it needs to do in little more than an hour. The screenwriter billed here as Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring) was the screenwriter and original novelist of Build My Gallows High/Out of the Past, and also wrote The Big Steal and Baby Face Nelson among others. The dialogue is clipped and menacing ("We'll bump him on the way," one of the heavies says casually) and the often claustrophobic spaces are used to good effect. Robert Lowery, who played Batman in the 1948 movie serial, has the right air of the doomed noir hero initially caught between the hard-bitten gangster's moll and femme fatale, Betty, (portrayed perfectly by Lola Lane,) and the innocent and beautiful schoolteacher, June (Barbara Britton), who eventually decides to help him prove his innocence after he is unwittingly embroiled in a bank robbery which leaves two dead. The cast is uniformly good, and the tension never lets up. The DVD I saw was in very poor condition; I hope someone will set about restoring this film to its full glory. As Lem Dobbs said on the commentary to Double Indemnity: "There's no such thing as a bad film noir." This low-budget gem proves him right.