Guilty Bystander

Director Joseph Lerner does not have much of a track record: his two best known works are GUILTY BYSTANDER and C -MAN, and neither is memorable.

Zachary Scott was a handsome actor with the bad luck of landing roles reflecting ugly souls. Even when he is not an out and out weasel, as in MILDRED PIERCE, he still cannot rise above being the dipsomaniac that he is in GUILTY BYSTANDER. His acting is competent, as ever, he is just plain dislikable, not least because he keeps surrendering so easily to the bottle even after finding out that his very young son was abducted.

Pretty Faye Emerson, who played opposite Scott in other films, does not make much sense. She wants to find her little boy, enlists ex-hubby Scott's help, but then seems do nothing, basically just prettifying the screen. I was more impressed with the small parts of J Bromberg as the high blood pressure Varkas who slaps Scott; Mary Boland, as the landlord who keeps encouraging Scott to drink; and, above all, Jed Prouty as the malevolent Dr Elder, who knows more than he lets on.

Photography is good for a B noir. Script suffers from poor cause and effect, the son's disappearance failing to get to the former cop Scott as focused as any father would be, and the motivation for a serious felony like the abduction of a child, is never properly explained.

Not bad, but far from good.

This movie presents a curious case. It obviously was made on a rock-bottom budget (and looks it); its plot -- about a kidnapped boy -- is as hard to follow as The Big Sleep's, without any of that movie's big-studio glamour and high gloss; and prints of the movie in circulation, with poor sound and visuals, don't help its reputation either. Nonetheless, Guilty Bystander has a few very strong points in its favor. Chief among them is the old pro Mary Boland as Smitty, the proprietress of a fleabag hotel several notches below the threshold of respectability; she's a scheming old battleax who has more going on under her unkempt wisps of grey hair than she wants her cronies and go-fers to know. Next there's Zachary Scott, as Max Thursday, an ex-cop now sleeping off benders in the same fleabag, where he's kept on as the house dick; an underrated actor, he invests his loser's role with a painful intensity, stumbling and limping from skid row to waterfront to warehouse in pursuit for the son he hasn't seen in years. As his ex-wife and mother of the kidnapped boy, Faye Emerson (Mrs. Elliott Roosevelt to you), brings more than her fabled bone structure to the part. In fact, with better acting than you have any right to expect (plus an unrelentingly depressing milieu), Guilty Bystander is more than a curio; it's as if the cast knew what a lousy movie they signed up for and decided to go for broke anyway.

Zachary Scott is an ex-cop with a bad case of alcoholism. He's a house detective at a sleazy hotel, sleeping one off, when his ex-wife, Faye Emerson wakes him to tell him their son has been kidnapped, his ex-colleagues are sympathetic, but it's up to Scott to track the abductors through the Skid Row world and rescue his son.... and himself.

This movie benefits from a strong, sympathetic story, and location shooting on the low-rent streets of downtown New York. There's a lot of talking, though, for such a usually visual genre, and the performances, while appropriate, are not terribly interesting. Scott and Miss Emerson start out with low-affect performances. Miss Emerson mumbles her lines in a tired and hopeless manner, and Scott spends the first half with subdued reactions. It's how a lot of depressives act, but it's not terribly interesting to watch.

The cast is eked out with some good performers, Mary Boland plays the sort of down-on-heels ex-floozie that Esther Howard usually did for Paramount Noirs, Sam Levene is the police captain who can't help because of the rule book, and J. Edward Bromberg, Kay Medford, and Jed Prouty have memorable roles. The result is a film noir that is highly watchable.

'Guilty Bystander' is the sort of film that appeals a lot to me, being someone who has loved the genre it fits under for a long time (drama/thriller with a noir-ish edge) and who really liked the idea. Not a novel idea, but it had real potential to be intriguing and suspenseful with the right execution. Have liked Zachary Scott in other roles, and was interested in seeing him in the anti-hero sort of role rather than the cads and villains he usually played and as a lead rather than support.

While not a bad film and its good things are great, 'Guilty Bystander' doesn't really live up to its potential and could have improved significantly in many major areas. It is a good representation of Scott, was surprised actually at how much so and has a couple of good set pieces. But 'Guilty Bystander' should have been a lot more compelling, tauter and suspenseful than it turned out, and the wildly inconsistent storytelling (which about three of the flaws fit under) is where it most falls down.

There are good things here. Scott is very good here, subdued but also suitably hard boiled and with the right amount of intensity and edge needed for an anti-hero sort of character. The rest of the cast are also fine, if not quite on his level. Even though low budget, the film looks good. Especially in the suitably moody and quite stylish photography and the lighting has effective use of darkness and shadows.

Furthermore, there are a couple of effective scenes, most notably the subway and staircase ones that are particularly well shot and where the most tension and intrigue comes from.

A lot could have been done better on the other hand. The story manages to be both flimsy and convoluted, a story that tries to have too many plot elements and strands and does far too little with all of them so there is no substance. We never get to know the characters either, they are very sketchy and there are too many. The film is also far too talky, and quite a lot of it is extraneous and could easily have been trimmed.

Despite liking Dmitri Tiomkin's music usually, for me his score here is overwrought and more suited to melodrama (one of the few scores of his where it felt like he had scored for the wrong film or didn't know what it was). The ending is another one of all the films seen recently that is too mawkish and too much like it belonged in another film. The direction is pretty routine and uninspired, apart from occasional flashes of greatness.

Concluding, underwhelming but watchable. See it for Scott. 5/10.

I originally saw this movie on TV back in the fifties. I was in my teens and up until then my primary interest in films was for Disney and big budget Hollywood musicals, lots of flash and flair. After seeing Guilty Bystander I soon began to turn on to films like The Maltese Falcon, Woman in the Window and Angel Face. These films did not give me that happy feeling but rather kept me leaning forward in my chair. When they were over I didn't feel gratified and satisfied; I felt unsettled but mentally stimulated. Noir films are about people in trouble. The hero, or rather the protagonist, is deeply flawed. He is not a nice guy. However, he is kind of admirable. He overcomes his flaws and sets things to right. In Guilty Bystander the hero is an ex-cop named Max Thursday. He is an alcoholic who could not stand up to the demands of being a police officer and quit to become a private eye but couldn't handle that either. When his ex-wife informs him that their son has apparently been kidnapped, he is forced to come to grips with some very unpleasant truths about himself and people he thought he knew. The film checks a lot of the boxes to qualify as noir but it also has a number of failings. There are plots holes and much of the acting is clumsy. Scott as Thursday occasionally embarrasses himself but mostly projects well as a man trying hard to play a bad hand while not fully understanding the game. The film is based on the first of six novels featuring Thursday. The author was Wade Miller, a pseudonym for two guys who wrote a lot of noir crime fiction beside those six. They were probably as good as Raymond Chandler and his Phillip Marlowe character but never were as big a name, nor as well known today. I don't know if this film had anything to do with their lack of success in Hollywood or not but it's a pity that we don't have as much of Thursday as we do of Marlowe.