The Guilty

I've recorded a handful of the Noir Alley selections that I haven't seen before, and recently got around to watching one of the more obscure movies, a little B picture called The Guilty.

Don Castle, who was apparently a friend of the producer, stars as Mike Carr, a World War II veteran who walks into a bar one evening and starts talking to the bartender about what happened some time in the past, cue the flashback because that's just such an original plot device.... Mike was living in an apartment near the bar with his war buddy Johny Dixon (Wally Cassell). Johnny wound up with a mild case of PTSD, as he's fairly nervous by nature now, and Mike seems to be helping take care of him to an extent.

Living nearby is the Mitchell family. The family has adult twin sisters, Estelle and Linda (both played by Bonita Granville, all grown up from her Nancy Drew days), and it should be unsurprising that the sisters have met the two war veterans living nearby. Mom, it seems, is a widow (at least, I don't recall seeing the father and there's no Mr. Mitchell listed among the characters), which would explain why she's taken in a boarder, Mr. Tremholt (John Litel, who had played Nancy Drew's father, so a little extra ick here), who seems a bit too interested in the tiwns. Since this is a movie, it should also not be a surprise that the two sisters wind up romantically involved with the two war veterans.

In another twist that could only be a Hollywood thing, the two sisters have totally different personalities. Linda is nice, and Estelle is a nasty, manipulative blankety-blank who probably would have boiled a bunny 40 years later in Fatal Attraction. Johnny is in love with Linda while Mike starts a relationship with Estell. Johnny seems the most serious about the relationship of the four, going so far as to buy Linda a bracelet. But Linda decides to break things off, returning the bracelet. Linda then winds up dead.

So it's a natural assumption that Johnny should be a prime suspect. And with his psychiatric condition from the war, he knows that he'll be suspected, and that he has no alibi. So he makes things worse by going into hiding. The police send in a detective in the form of Heller (Regis Toomey) to investigate, and hope that Mike can get Johnny out of hiding. Estelle, meanwhile, has her own motivations.

The Guilty is based on a story by Cornell Woolrich, who was also responsible for the stories behind noirs like The Window and suspense like Rear Window, so you know there's good source material here. While a low budget in noir often meant that directors had to get creative, I felt like the low budget actually hurt this one. As the story is about twins, having that low budget made things a bit too confusing at times. That's a shame since, as I said, the script feels like a pretty good one.

Eddie Muller suggested in the Noir Alley airing that this is one of the films that his Noir Foundation helped preserve, with it due to come out on DVD and/or Blu-ray. It doesn't seem to be available at Amazon, but Critics' Choice, which I believe is the company now nominally partnering with TCM, has a Flicker Alley double feature of that and High Tide.