The Guilty

Don Castle is sharing a cheap room with his ex-lieutenant from the army, Wally Cassell. Castle is studying on the G. I. Bill. Cassell drinks a lot. Each is dating Bonita Granville, but it's all right, since she's twins in this movie. One is nice, the other is nasty. Then the nice one gets murdered, and detective Regis Toomey is on the case.

This being derived from a Cornell Woolrich story, it's surprising the guys aren't twins also; it would have saved on actors' salaries, although the process shots might have eaten up the difference. Miss Granville -- soon to become the wife of Jack Wrather, the producer of this movie -- is doubled by showing the back of another actress, or having her voice come from offscreen.

Of course, many odd possibilities arose in my mind. Did one sister kill the other, and then masquerade as the victim? What is John Litel doing in the cast? I started out confused, and even after the ending, I was still confused, because this was directed by John Reinhardt, who liked to throw in every film noir trope whether it should be there or not. Always watchable for the sake of Woolrich's sick symbolism, it's not one of the best noirs I've seen.

In 1946, Olivia De Havilland donned monogram brooches and identity necklaces to take the dual role of good and bad twins Ruth and Terry in Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror. The following year Bonita Granville followed suit, as good and bad twins Linda and Estelle, in Monogram's sub-basement adaptation of a Cornell Woolrich story. Of the two, The Guilty is the creepier, more haunting movie, taking a place of dubious honor amid the nether reaches of film noir.

Mustachioed Don Castle shares his walk-up flat with his superior from army days, Wally Cassel, who's a little unstable owing to a head injury sustained in combat. They're involved in a complicated foursome with the twins; when one of the fellows breaks up with one of the girls, the other takes up with the ditched sister. But the insanely jealous Estelle keeps playing one guy off the other; she wants both and her sister to have neither. One night Linda disappears; later her body is found on a rooftop, in a barrel of gravel (she was too big to shove down the incinerator shaft). Police investigator Regis Toomey encounters a baffling maze of alibis and false clues (Castle is on the hunt as well), until the movie ends with climaxes within climaxes.

All this takes place in but three sleazy sets: The men's apartment; that of the twins, their mother and a long-time boarder (John Litel); and a corner bar from which most of the story is narrated in flashback. A few forays into the dark, deserted streets only enhance the claustrophobia, the obsessiveness of Woolrich's nightmare vision. (And his obsessive fiction reuses the same themes and gambits over and over; there are parallels here to the same year's The Fall Guy, which resembles The Black Angel, which...).

Granville, of course, will ever be the screen embodiment of Nancy Drew, from the four programmers she starred in as the teenaged sleuth during the late '30s. Her career started to sputter in the next decade; for one thing her girlish exuberance didn't blossom into womanly glamor. But she developed a tough, no-nonsense, very-'40s face (not unlike Ann Savage's). Her noir appearances were limited to a small (but meaty) role in The Glass Key and a leading one in the low-budget Suspense. It's a shame, because grew up into quite a good bad girl.

Army buddies Mike Carr and Johnny Dixon are roommates after the war. They get involved with twins Linda and Estelle Mitchell (Bonita Granville). When Linda dies, suspicion falls on Johnny who was dating her. Alex Tremholt is the fatherly longtime renter at the Mitchell home. Detective Heller investigates. In the present time, Mike is narrating the story while discussing it with a bartender.

This has classic noir construction. One twin is good and the other is bad. It's a B-movie. It's stripped down. The actors are functional. Bonita Granville is doing both twins. They could differentiate the twins a bit more. I wonder if they should put on a wig for one of them. It's not the best acting nor the worst. There is some big over-acting. It has overwrought noir style although the camera work is mostly perfunctory. The story has plenty of turns which functions well and I like the final twist which is meant to overturn the audience's expectations. The filmmaker is able to execute this classic twist by underplaying him. It's well done.

Bonita Granville was an extremely talented younger actress, as was clear from 'The Beloved Brat' (1938) and the four Nancy Drew films she made, for instance. She had a special charm and directness which was most refreshing. Here she is, somewhat older, playing identical twins in an extremely low-budget noir thriller produced by her husband Jack Wrather. The sets are so cheap, it seems as if a puff of wind would blow them down, and they are bleak as well, perhaps on purpose to make the atmosphere one of desolation. She is certainly cast against type, since the main twin whom she plays is a bad girl, and Bonita was famous for being a sweetie pie. However, it works, and she proves she can be as sultry and venomous as any gal if she wants to, and she does want to. The two guys are Don Castle and Wally Cassell, which reminds me that Louis Ferdinand-Celine wrote a novel the English title of which is 'Castle to Castle', not bad for this situation, if we change it to 'Cassell to Castle', as one twin passes between the two guys. This is a very powerful and effective noir story with its twists and grisly side. As it is 1947, there is a guy suffering from serious shell-shock, holding his face in his hands and saying: 'I'm going to crack up completely again, like I did the first time'. There are desperate undercurrents of insane jealousy and passion, a disappearance and murder, seething resentments and kisses that are more like football touchdowns, they are so rough. For something made for ten dollars, this is a really good thriller. The voice-over narrative works extremely well, and the whole thing is a knockout if you can forgive the fact that somebody along the way forgot about the need for production values. Anyway, there's Bonita, and you even get two for the price of one.

From 1947, "The Guilty" is a film noir starring Bonita Granville, Don Castle, Regis Toomey, John Litel, and Wally Cassell.

This is strictly poverty row, Monogram. Bonita Granville plays twins, Linda and Estelle. One is sweet and the other is a vamp. I had a hard time figuring out who was who.

Castle and Cassell play roommates Mike and Johnny. Johnny is the nervous type. When the sweet twin is killed, Johnny is sure he will be blamed and makes himself seem guilty by acting like such a wreck.

This movie is dry as a bone. Castle is one of those stereotypical B movie tough guys who talks out of one side of his mouth. Granville was always a good actress, but the twins' characters aren't well fleshed-out and I'm sure she had no time to work on differences between them. By the way, her husband, Jack Wrather, produced this, and if you're a baby boomer, you know that Bonita Granville Wrather produced the Lassie series.

Regis Toomey plays the detective, and he's pretty one note. He and Castle sounded like they were imitating hard-boiled detectives.

What bothered me is that we knew before we even saw Estelle and Linda that the two were identical twins. So Estelle keeping her back to Linda while she was talking to her in the beginning was a big waste of time.

When she walks out to face her sister, she does it in a grand way, like the audience should be surprised that she looks like Linda. The Castle narration mentions TWICE that they're lookalikes beforehand. Not very well done.