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'The Threat,' 'The Purple Gang' and 'The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond' Debut ...

13.09.11

The earliest and most tightly wound of the three movies is "The Threat," a 1949 RKO film noir that stars square-jawed tough guy Charles McGraw as "Red" Kluger, a "vicious murderer" who busts out of Folsom Prison to seek revenge on the police detective (Michael O'Shea), the district attorney (Frank Conroy) and the nightclub dish (Virginia Grey) he blames for his incarceration.

"Kluger's out!" -- Those are the first spoken words in the film, and they convey a sense of urgency that genre-hopping veteran director Felix E. Feist pretty much sustains throughout the economical 66-minute running time of this taut deadline thriller. Like quite a few other postwar noirs ( " The Prowler ," for example), the final act finds the characters hiding out in a shack in the pitiless desert environment of the American West -- a landscape that reminds us where the atomic bomb was born while also prophesying the lifeless wasteland of a post-nuclear-attack America. This end-of-the-world context exposes the petty, pathetic nature of Kluger's animal-like brutality ("Got your pliers?" he asks an associate with a yen for torture), and reveals Red to be a social as well as physical atavism; no wonder the doomed criminal breaks a man's watch, as if he were making a futile attempt to master or stop time. The hero of the piece, the detective, is a man out of time himself; he's glib and apparently loving, but somehow broken, too, even before Kluger smashes a chair over his face. His pregnant wife (Julie Bishop) begs him not to look for trouble, but the detective replies that his job requires him to track the killer. "Job?" she retorts. "To you, it's more like a game. You love the excitement, the danger."

Source: Memphis Commercial Appeal (blog)