A 1950 film noir (presented last weekend on TCM's Noir Alley as a recent recipient of a film restoration spearheaded by none other than Drive's director Nicholas Winding Refn) about a kidnapping which spurs a drunken father (& former cop) to sober up & do the right thing. Starring Zachary Scott (an alcoholic in real life who specialized in playing silver screen cads) who's a former lawman who has fallen on hard times where his estranged wife, played by Faye Emerson, finds him working as a house detective in a fleabag hotel run by a souse of a woman of a certain age, played by Mary Boland (in her last performance). Promising to stay off the sauce long enough to track down his son, we enter a dark & deprived landscape of thieves & hustlers who pinball poor Scott from either end of town (in one sequence he's knocked out & wakes up in a holding cell to meet up w/his old police captain, played by Sam Levene) long enough to sort out the details of the kidnapping to reveal the true rationale for the crime (some stolen jewels). As shambling & pathetic a figure Scott essays, it's nothing compared to layabouts & lush-heads who populate this dark end of town. Other than an uncharacteristically happy ending where the parents are reunited w/child, the film's dark shadows earn their keep as the menacing harbingers of doom who seem to be as out to get poor Scott as the humans the city is populated with.
Review of Guilty Bystander
