The Price of Fear

Businesswoman Merle Oberon runs over an old man and speeds off. She has second thoughts and stops at a phone booth. After she gets the police, Lex Barker, on the run from gangsters who are about to kill his partner, spots it, hops in and zooms off. Miss Oberon reports the car stolen. Buddy/police Lieutenant Charles Drake thinks there's something wrong with the set-up.

There's something about this sort of 1950s drama that strikes me as not impossible, but brittle. So many of the lines are delivered without any emotional weight to them, as if the character is thinking about his words, then considering why he has chosen those words, until all feeling has been rendered out out them. Perhaps it's the pace of the dialogue that I find so unappealing. In the late 1930s, the pace of dialogue in the movies sped up, and the audience was given the impression of a stream of consciousness. Certainly Joseph Gershenson's two bars of theme that rise up majestically from a large orchestra overwhelm the performances instead of accentuating them.