Fallguy

This is, obviously, a low budget movie with a fairly predictable "man on the run" plot. Leaving that aside ...

The opening credits are as good as anything Saul Bass did in the wake of "Anatomy of a Murder."

The jazz score is wonderful, and it is not the composer's fault that the director chose to turn up the volume so high that it becomes intrusive at times and even overrides the dialogue. There is a proto-Peter-Gunn feel to it that is really better than this film deserves.

There are some nice location shots around Los Angeles, and the scenes of the teens dancing at the hamburger joint are almost documentary-like in their naturalness.

Nice cars! Nice bus! Nice short-bed newspaper delivery truck! The hot little convertible and the young male lead give the whole affair the air of an episode of "77 Sunset Strip."

The director seems to come from a planet where people's faces are not important but their shoes, legs, and waists are. Shot after shot is deliberately set up to scope out men's shoes and trousers. The result is almost fetishistic, but, weirdly enough, kind of "manly" at the same time.

The bizarre angle shots in the sterile modern rooms look forward to the 1965 French New Wave Science Fiction / Film Noir cult classic "Alphaville" by Jean-Luc Godard -- only not ironic.

The sleazy exploitation subplot, including underwear-clad escorts, a ridiculous cat-fight, men slapping women around and roughing them up, and multiple negligee scenes, are spectacular examples of what happens when a demented director tries to interject a bevy of pretty young "blonde models" with no acting experience into a noirish crime drama.

Some of the actors are wooden and many of the interior scenes were badly miked, so there are unexpected echoes. and the resultant efforts to correct these deficiencies with overdubbing are failures. So what? Who cares?

The build-up of violence has an early Coen Brothers feel to it, somewhere between "Blood Simple" and "Miller's Crossing," only without their great dialogue. In fact, there is very little dialogue in this film at all, and some of what there is seems improvised.

The ending is completely over the top and veers off into Quentin Tarantino territory, and the denouement is a sweet heartbreaker, and entirely unexpected.

I gave this movie a solid "7" because i think it should be shown to all aspiring film-makers. It is a fascinating study in good intentions that do not quite make it to a professional level. It is not a travesty, like an Ed Wood film, but it is just enough below the threshold of what you are expecting that you wish Raymond Burr, Frank Cady, Edd "Kookie" Byrnes, and Sterling Hayden had been in the cast, and that the director had been Edgar G. Ulmer.

"Fallguy" is a very cheap crime film with small-time actors. Yet despite this, it's effective and worth seeing.

When the story begins, the mob tries to kill one of its own members. However, the killing is bumbled and the man is run off the road but is very much alive. A young man sees the car go off the embankment and goes to help--only to have the man draw a gun on him and force him to drive to a doctor's home. The doctor, too, is part of the gang and the intended victim and doc soon get into it and the doctor kills the man...and the young man sees it all. However, the local cops are also in on it and instead of arresting the doctor, they spend the movie chasing the innocent man. Does this poor schmuck stand a chance?!

As I said before, the film is a cheapo production. It also has a few deficits--such as a cheap musical score as well as a few scenes where the acting is a bit suspect (such as the crazy catfight that comes from out of no where midway through the movie). But on balance, the good outweighs the bad and it's a pretty good suspense film.

If you do watch the picture, you might try finding it somewhere other than on YouTube, as the copy there is very dark and murky.

This obscurity is one of the stream of grungy B-movies with boisterous jazz scores and snazzy credit sequences that followed in the wake of iconoclastic A-pix like "Anatomy of a Murder" and "The Man with the Golden Arm". The credits, with a twisting, falling cut-out silhouette, are a pretty cool Saul Bass imitation, and the main title appears abruptly at the very end of the picture.

The story concerns a hot-shot teen who stumbles onto a mob execution in progress. The gangsters conveniently set him up as the fall guy. He spends most of the picture on the run from both the cops and a brutish hit man called "the Indian" while he tries to unravel the plot against him.

This seems to be a one-off independent production and the low budget shows. The sets are minimal (several scenes look like they were filmed in someone's basement), the low-key lighting harsh, and the day-for-night photography and post-sync dubbing are too obvious. Nonetheless, the filmmakers are canny enough to make this a very watchable film. The throbbing score and quick cutting keep up the pace, the acting is edgy and believable, and there's a good sense of visual composition with noirish shadows. Best of all, the story throws something sensational at us every ten minutes (my favorite bit being a cat-fight that breaks out incongruously in the middle of a mob sit-down).

It doesn't have the resonance of "Blast of Silence" or "Angel's Flight", but taken on its own terms, it's much more successful than one would expect.

While driving home one night, Ed Dugan spots a car accident. When he goes to check up on the driver, the badly injured driver pulls a gun on him. He forces Dugan to drive him to local doctor Don Alderette, where he dies, after accusing the doctor of double-crossing him. Dugan is taken into custody by police chief Louis Gartner, but when he realizes Gartner is trying to use him as a fall guy by faking an accident, Dugan manages to escape. Soon Dugan finds out that Alderette, Gartner and local newspaper owner George Mitchell are the main guys behind a local crime syndicate.

There really isn't much to say. Most of the principal cast & crew members have a handful of credits on here if that, and it shows. Aside from the nicely done opening credits, obviously inspired by Saul Bass's work, and the 'hip' jazzy score the movie feels amateurish on almost every level. One-time actress Madeline Frances as the doctor's daughter is a welcome breath of fresh air, I actually enjoyed her performance. Then again, she had very little competition here, when at times some of the actors seem to have trouble remembering their lines.

I can forgive a lot of stuff for these low/no-budget movies. But there's just too much that needs forgiving here. The movie takes itself way too serious, which is its biggest crime. 'Fallguy' tries too hard to be better than it is. It's probably for the best that director Donn Harling produced and directed only one movie. Avoid. 4/10

The local head of the Syndicate is killed, and the police pick up Ed Dugan. He's confused and adamant that he didn't have anything to do with it. He was driving by when the hit took place. He escapes, and now he has the police and the crooks after him. The Syndicate originally looked on him as a convenient fall guy, but now that he's gone in the wind, they're worried.

It's an interesting story, but there's a lot of clumsiness in transferring it to the screen. The actors are a mixed lot, from competent to inept. The camerawork by Vilis Lapenieks is fluid, with lots of dramatic shots. the blaring jazz-influenced score by Jaime Mendoza-Nava is intrusive rather than supportive. these things make what could have been an interesting if cheap B movie into an overblown effort.