The FAST services have a lot of stuff that I'd have to guess has fallen into the public domain, or else is extremely cheap to get the rights to. And because it's fairly old and/or British stuff, it's things I've never heard of. One example that sounded interesting was Private Hell 36, so I sat down to watch it in order to be able to do a review here.
The movie starts with a pre-credits sequence of an elevator door in a New York apartment building opening up, to reveal that somebody's been murdered, and the murderer is trying to get away. A voiceover informs us that the motive for the murder was money, as some $300,000 in cash was stolen. A year has gone by, and that money hasn't shown up. But now, some of it is beginning to show up all over the country.
Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran) is a sergeant with the LAPD. One night, he foils a crime at a drugstore. The police investigate, and find out that one of the prescriptions was paid for with a $50 bill, which isn't that ridiculous, except that a trace of the bill reveals that it's one of the bills stolen in that elevator murder/robbery a year ago. In some ways that's good, but in other ways it's bad, because Bruner's commander, Capt. Michaels (Dean Jagger), sends Bruner and his partner, Sgt. Jack Farnham (Howard Duff) out to do the boring legwork of finding out who originally passed the bill in Los Angeles.
The two wind up at a bar where the bartender claimed to get the bill from lounge singer Lilli Marlowe (Ida Lupino). She can't remember who gave her the $50 tip, not so much because she doesn't like the police. In fact, in one of those common Hollywood tropes, she's going to wind up falling for Bruner, and the feeling gets mutual. At least Farnham has a wife (Dorothy Malone). Anyhow, she gets roped into going with Bruner and Farnham to the racetrack every day since that's where the suspect is most likely to try to pass off the bills, considering how much cash goes through a racetrack.
Eventually Lilli recognizes a face, and that eventually leads to a chase through the hills above Los Angeles. However, the guy they're chasing loses control of his car, crashing down the mountain and getting killed in the fall. The two detectives investigate, and find a box containing something like $80,000 of the money from the robbery. But there's a lot of wind, and that begins to blow the bills out of the box and into the surrounding canyon. Bruner, now having a girlfriend with expensive tastes, decides he's going to pocket some of the money. After all, he and Farnham are the only ones who might know how much money was in that box.
Of course, there's a Production Code, so we know that Bruner is never going to get away with it. But how exactly is he going to get caught, and how is Farnham going to deal with things? For those answers, you'll just have to watch Private Hell 36.
Private Hell 36 is a movie that was independently produced by Ida Lupino's company The Filmakers, together with her then-husband Collier Young. That may be why I hadn't heard of it before. It's a fairly low budget affair, which probably limits just how truly great it could become. But for what it does, it's quite successful, which probably shouldn't be a surprise considering the level of talent on offer. In addition to the cast, there's a dialogue coach named David Peckinpah, who would eventually start using his middle name Sam. There's also fine direction from Don Siegel, who would go on to much bigger and better things.
Private Hell 36 is still available, with ads, on TubiTV, and is definitely worth watching.
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