13 West Street

A couple of months back, TCM had a spotlight of "Juvenile Delinquent" pictures. This gave me the chance to catch another one that I hadn't seen before, 13 West Street. It's just gotten a new DVD release as part of an Alan Ladd box set from Mill Creek, so I recently watched it to do a reivew here.

As you can probably guess, Alan Ladd is the star here, although it's one of his final movies and he died suddenly, so he's beginning to look a bit haggard here. That's not necessarily a bad thing, however, considering the character he's playing and what happens to him. Ladd is Walt Sherrill, a rocket scientist living in Southern California with wife Tracey (Dolores Dorn). He's got a fair amount of stress in his life, since this isn't very long after the Soviets sent Yuri Gagarin into space, and NASA really wants that next rocket, so there's a lot of work for Walt to do.

One night he's driving home through what looks like an industrial district. Not having paid attention to his car, he runs out of gas, which means getting out to walk to the nearest gas station and buy a gallon or two. As he's walking down an otherwise deserted street, another car shows up, this one with five teenaged boys who have taken the car for a joyride. For whatever reason, they decide to get out of the car and beat the crap of out Walt!

Walt is unsurprisingly pissed, at least once he begins to recover from the concussion. He somewhat vaguely remembers that one of the boys might have been named Chuck (Michael Callan), and that they may have said something about getting thrown out of a bar. Police detective Sgt. Koleski (Rod Steiger) takes all of this information down, and surprisingly gets to work on the case. Nowadays they'd probably just treat it as a cold case right from the start and get to easier things that allow them to engage in asset forfeiture.

Somehow, Chuck and his friends find out that Walt has been talking to the police. So they decide that they're going to threaten Walt some more, first telephoning him since they got his name and address from the ID his wallet, and then even coming over to the house to harass him more personally. That seems rather stupid, but who ever said petty criminals are smart?

So even though Koleski has continued on with the investigation, Walt decides he's going to do some investigating of his own. His brother-in-law is even the prinicpal of one of the big high schools, and might be able to help with yearbook photos of the various Chucks for Walt to see if he can positively ID any of them.

Of course, Walt gets so obsessive in trying to find his assailants that he starts harassing anybody who looks like they could be a possible match, such as when he tails a car that looked like the one the kids were riding in when they assaulted Walt. Big mistake, since it's the wrong car. The kids read the daily paper, too, and find out about the incident, which only makes life more difficult for Walt.

A lot of reviewers bring up Death Wish when mentioning this movie, and it's understandable why. Of course, this is a full decade before Death Wish, when societal norms hadn't yet broken down so much and there was still a Production Code that had to be followed. Still, 13 West Street isn't a bad little movie.

I do think, however, that you're going to have to going to have to suspend some disbelief. The detective spending days on this one case seemed unrealistic to me, as did the extra harassment or the blurb in the newspaper that the teens just happened to read. I know these are cinematic tropes, but still.

This being a Mill Creek box set, I don't know how good the prints are going to be, but the one or two other Mill Creek sets of Columbia movies I've picked up really aren't that bad for the price point.