Saturday, November 04, 2017

TCM's Film Noir for 10 a.m. ET, Sunday November 5, is Split Second (1953)

 

 

By David in TN
Saturday, November 4, 2017 at 8:12:00 P.M. EDT

 

The bad guys and their hostages
 

TCM's Film Noir for 10 a.m. ET, Sunday November 5, is Split Second (1953).
 

Jan Sterling, left, and Alexis Smith
 

Stephen McNally plays an escaped psycho killer holding four hostages at an abandoned town that is going to be blown up in an Atomic bomb test. A-bomb tests were a big thing in the early 50's.
 

L-r: Keith Andes, Jan Sterling, Richard Egan and Arthur Hunnicut
 

Jan Sterling plays a hustling Las Vegas dancer. Alexis Smith is perfect as the cheating wife-from-hell who'll do anything, including playing up to the sadistic killer to get out of trouble.
 

 

1 comment:

David In TN said...

The TCM Film Noir for Sunday, November 12, at 10 am ET is The Window (1949). This film features Bobby Driscoll as a young boy who likes to tell stories he made up. One night, sleeping outside in the summer heat, he sees an actual murder. When he tries to tell people, they don't believe him.

Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale are the boy's parents. Ruth Roman and Paul Stewart are the sinister couple living on the floor above who killed a seaman, whom they were attempting to rob.

In a hair-raising climax, the killers try to murder Driscoll to shut him up.

The film shows the condition of tenement dwellers among the New York City working class of the time.

Bobby Driscoll was a child actor whose career dried up as he got older, eventually turning to drugs. In 1968, age 31, he was found dead in an abandoned New York City tenement building, similar to the one in this film.

I saw Bobby Driscoll in "Song of the South," the Disney musical banned from view for decades. I was eight or nine years old. It was scary watching it in the theater when his character was chased down and gored by a bull.