The Missing Juror

Film Daily said this picture was for people who were not too demanding. I would say it's for people who are not too awake. As sloppy as it is moronic (the deaths are described as accidents, though one man is shot from a passing car), it has a murderer whose identity is obvious very soon after the start. We are asked to believe that a man can, with hair dye, glasses, and a false beard, impersonate someone who has spent several days with his victim. The impersonator also has a very distinctive, velvety voice that would not have been identical with the absent man's. The impersonation is blindingly obvious to anyone watching the movie, so how can all the people IN the movie be taken in?

If a real woman were as passive and dumb as Janis Carter's character, the menaced heroine, she would not have lasted to adulthood. Approached by the weaponless murderer (who has fooled her for days), Janis has two opportunities to save her life, but just stands there, looking mildly worried.

This movie certainly makes a demand of its own--for one's disbelief to be suspended higher than any of the movie's gallows.

NOTE: Don't read the cast credit on IMDb or this movie won't even be a mystery for the first 15 minutes.

For the first 15 minutes I thought this movie was not bad (not good, but at least a reasonable example of the B mystery movie genre). The problem occurs in minute 16, or thereabout, when the movie starts to telegraph it's punch so clearly that only an idiot wouldn't see who the killer really is, and what the wrap up is going to be. After that you can turn the movie off, except that stopping is like ceasing to watch a bad accident that you know you shouldn't be looking at. Actually, a bad accident is a lot more interesting than this movie.

I won't give away the "surprise". Instead I'll let you participate in the contest to see if you can guess what I was able to figure out by the time of the fire in the mental hospital. It was so obvious that you would have be from Mars to not figure it out.

I like a good bad movie, but this isn't one of those. Try some other movie with "Juror" in the title - any other movie with "Juror" in the title.

It looks like an early Richard Fleischer's movie for RKO, or also Bob Wise's for the same studio. But Columbia did the very same for the likes of Budd Boetticher, Edward Dmytryk, William Castle, hirig them for short and fast paced thrillers. This one is excellent as another from Boetticher: BEHIND LOCKED DOORS, that I will comment tomorrow. This topic looks much like the thirties mystery yarns, but here it moves up a gear. Boetticher was a real gifted good director, it also reminds me early Anthony Mann's films, for RKO if my memory is good. Nothing here let us guess this film maker will be a provider of awesome little westerns, starring Randolph Scott.

"The Missing Juror" is worth seeing since it's an early directorial film of Budd Boetticher, so it has some of his great camerawork. The film stars noir actress Janis Carter, Jim Bannon, George Macready, and Mike Mazurki.

A man is tried and found guilty of murder, and then the jurors start dying. A reporter (Bannon) becomes interested in the case - and in one of the jurors (Carter).

The problem is, if you're old enough and enough of a film fan, you'll have this plot figured out fairly quickly.

My favorite part of this film, I have to admit, were the dictation belts which, thirty-plus years after this movie, I was using.

The story may have more holes than Grandma's sieve, but it's still worth catching up with. For one, it's got cult actress Janis Carter who always shows more eyeball than ought to be legally allowed, along with the high-class George Macready just then perfecting his mad cackle-- and whoever in production thought his cultured voice was not a dead give-a-way. It's also one of director Buddy Boetticher's first outings, and already he's a camera master—catch those graceful dolly moves across the cut-a-way rooms. Then there's literary muscleman and masseuse Mike Mazurki throttling Macready's face blue while on a flight of poetic abandon. I just wish some of that imagination had carried over to repairing the story holes, like how crank-confessor Trevor Bardette knows so many details of the killings. Speaking of Bardette, his highly enthused performance suggests A-grade pay for a B-grade movie, making his mad lather a movie high point. Clearly, the 50-dollar budget didn't go into lighting since some scenes resemble a bat's cave and require the eyes of one to make out what's happening. Nonetheless, the film has almost as many promising noirish elements as the classic Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)—as another reviewer aptly compares. Too bad someone didn't send the script down to Rewrite for some hole-plugging plaster.