Without Warning!

"Without Warning" from 1952 is a low-budget production that concentrates on the drudgery of police work.

It stars actors I'm not familiar with, including Adam Williams and Meg Randall; Edward Binns plays a police detective). The film is done in a very natural style.

The search is on for a serial killer (Williams) with a penchant for killing young blondes with pinking shears. The police are frustrated with a lack of evidence; slowly but surely, they come closer to tracking down the killer.

At one point they send in an undercover police woman - lucky for her, the perp realizes they're being followed. This wrecks the undercover operation, as he's not likely to try and pick up another blond.

Figuring out from soil samples that the killer may be a gardener, police begin to canvass gardening businesses that may have sold the pinking shears.

The film concentrates on forensic work - today it seems simplistic, but back then, it was cutting edge. The focus is on the hard work that police do - no glamor, just a lot of worn shoe leather.

This is a virtually spotless transfer and for Film Noir fans who have to put up with beaten up prints of unjustly forgotten films that alone I think perhaps has lead other writers here to rate the movie a bit too highly. It is a police procedure picture (with a surprising amount of forensics used for the time) that unfortunately comes to an obvious ending that reduces what came before it. It is especially well scored and photographed on real(and unique) locations that make it seem very fresh.

It is like THE SNIPER, though that film deals with wider issues and has a harder edge and most distinct style, where this plays out like a really good episode of something like THE NAKED CITY, or DRAGNET. The ending is safe and small. The characters although well acted are really stock "types" and don't really become three dimensional.

That said the first half of the film is very good and all the positives other writers on IMDb have said are true. But this doesn't ever become a drama, staying safely in melodrama land and that keeps it as mostly by the numbers B picture. Everybody does their job well but also safely within the confines of a programmer. The script just can't let them break out into a real classic noir.

Like most people, probably, I had never heard about "Without Warning!" before, but it's a surprisingly tense and bleakly atmospheric mixture between film-noir and drama. The plot follows both a frustrated serial killer, who scouts for lurid blond women in sleazy Hollywood bars, and the police inspectors that are trying to catch him via profiling and the little pieces of forensic evidence that he leaves behind at each crime scene. I'm certainly not an expert of CSI-cinema, but since this film was released in 1952 already, it simply must be one of the earliest productions to make use of advanced & specialized researching techniques. The story of crazed killer Carl Martin is quite an unsettling one. With his good manners, baby-faced appearance and admirable job as a city gardener, he's the last person one would suspect to be a homicidal maniac. But at the beginning of each month, right after he cashed in his paycheck and can afford to dress up nicely and offer drinks to ladies, he prowls for pretty blonds that resemble his unfaithful ex-wife and lures them to remote places to stab them with his gardening shears. Police lieutenants Hamilton and Wade quickly figure out his patterns and profile, but can they arrest Martin before he unleashes his angers again on the innocent store owner's daughter Jane? Perhaps the film could have done without the redundant and overly dramatic voiceover guidance, but director Arnold Laven ("The Monster that Challenged the World") maintains a steady pace as well as a good balance between serial killer suspense and intriguing police work. The escape of Carl Martin following the murder of the stunningly hot nameless victim (Angela Stevens) that almost went wrong, as well as the entire finale up in the Hollywood hills, are genuinely exhilarating; - especially taking into consideration "Without Warning!" is a low-budgeted B-movie.

Found this on youtube--thought it might be campy and funny.... hardly! It's low-budget yes--but very well done. Wonderful to see what Los Angeles looked like in the very early 1950's!! Serial killer before that term was invented. Worth your time!!

The plot—a serial killer pursuing pretty blondes—is not exactly novel, however, the movie is better than I expected and very well done. Early on, the chase between cops and killer around the concrete jungle of LA freeways is both suspenseful and well staged. In fact the entire film appears to have been made on location, in parts of low-income east LA seldom seen on the Hollywood screen. For example, killer Martin's (Williams) slum-like hilltop neighborhood looks like the genuine thing, but with a good view of LA's downtown, plus the post-war grid of freeways slicing the urban landscape like concrete arteries.

Williams low-keys his psychopathic killer with little change of expression. That way we don't know what's boiling up underneath. Neither, for that matter, are the killings exploited for shock value. Instead the emphasis is on suspense as we follow the police investigators' attempts to track down the madman before the pile of blonde corpses gets higher. The influence of documentary-like approach to police methods is evident throughout. This was, after all, the era of Dragnet on TV. The movie also has a number of good touches. For example, the police chemist who needles the detectives in low-key fashion lends interest to a potentially routine scene; or the little girl with her broken doll that lends poignant flavor to the seedy hilltop neighborhood.

On the whole, the movie is done with care and imagination, and can hold its own with many of the better crime dramas of the day. One thing for sure, it at least merits inclusion in Leonard Maltin's too often unreliable movie guide. To me, it's a rather glaring omission even if it is an independent production with a no-name cast.