Guilty Bystander

Max Thursday (Zachary Scott) is an alcoholic former cop living in a rundown hotel owned by his friend Smitty. He gets a visit from his ex-wife Georgia. Her brother Fred Mace and their son Jeff are missing. Apparently, Jeff has been kidnapped and Fred is somehow involved.

This is a harsh pulpy noir. Zachary Scott is acting with all his chops. It has the brutality and hard-talk for the standard noir B-movie. The story isn't much but it functions well enough. I like many of the New York City exteriors. They're low rent and outside the normal glamor locations. I would like better for the action but it's still the old style. It's an old noir crime B-movie.

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 is beautifully photographed and features a score by Dimitri Tiomkin. Scott to me was always an uneven actor, there just doesn't seem to be much going on behind his eyes but he's pretty good in this film. The main character seems intent on remaining drunk and finding his son and for most of the movie he's more successful at finding drinks nearly everywhere he goes. There is a memorable chase/fight sequence in the New York subway, seemingly done for real on real locations, at another point there is a room full of corpses found post shoot out. And another scene on a darkened staircase that is well done on all levels.

But what drags the movie down is the seemingly shapeless plot or lack of one, and long dialog scenes which I guess in some instances are supposed to be romantic but are just long and talky. Nevertheless there are memorable moments of noir photography and music. It may not ultimately work, but is not without scattered virtues of production and performance.

This is a film about alcoholism. And, Zachary Taylor, playing an alcoholic, ex-cop, who has abandoned his family, plays the role very well.

Taylor's Max Thursday is told by his ex-wife that their son and her brother are missing. Thursday wants no help from the cops who he feels will take an apathetic approach to a case of a missing child and its uncle.

Along the way, Thursday, formerly a top cop, battles the bottle more than the untrustworthy, criminally-inclined, underworld figures he meets. One such figure is fellow alcoholic Angel, played brilliantly by Kay Medford. Angel almost steals the film, but is unfortunately quickly tossed aside (literally and figuratively) by the filmmakers.

Faye Emerson came out of retirement to act alongside Taylor. The two made the fabulous noir Danger Signal together five years earlier. She's excellent as the woman trying to find her son (and brother), and forced to rely on her disease-ridden ex-husband, who, by the way, she still loves. (She never declares it, but Emerson's acting, while nuanced, delivers the message.)

Mary Boland deserves mention here, too. The flop house proprietor has given Thursday room and board to be her "house dick."

Too bad, the film doesn't give much for the great Sam Levene to do. He played the police captain who's is noticeably absent after the first act. In fact, there's a couple of scenes where you expect his presence, but he's not there. I suspect the nickels and pennies budget created blemishes like this.

TCM is screening a pristine restored version of the film. Cinematographer Russell Harlan, ASC (Gerald Hirschfeld is also credited) does a super job of lighting gritty, real locations including interiors of abandoned tenements and New York's subway system.

Director Joseph Lerner botches the third act with help from screenwriter Don Ettlinger. But, I commend them for their success at guerrilla filmmaking as TCM's Eddie Muller points out the production could not afford any permits to shoot in the city's streets so the filmmakers did it without.

Overall, the film's fails to meet expectations, but is a gem for genre fans.

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.