I am intrigued by star power, that strange and innate aspect which makes one person on the screen more interesting than another.  I wonder if the opposite of that effect has a name and, if so, what that is called.  Whatever it is, Don Castle has the misfortune to possess this impairment.  As he plays the central character of 1947’s The Guilty, that is one strike against the film.

There are many other issues with this film, one I had difficulty appreciating, even with my predisposition to noir.  That genre leans toward complicated setups, but this one goes too far and becomes convoluted.  That’s especially odd given how few people are in the cast.

When the film opens, we’re following Castle as he walks down a city street.  In voiceover, we hear him talk about returning to the city after six months.  We don’t know where he’s been and, when we learn the answer, the explanation isn’t satisfying.  Then, the more I thought it, his disappearance really wasn’t important to the plot. 

That’s true of some other elements of this movie, such as Bonita Granville playing twin sisters.  In a bonus feature on this blu-ray, it is revealed there was only one sister in Cornell Woolrich’s short story upon which the screenplay is based.  I wouldn’t have suspected that from the resulting movie, though I did have a nagging doubt as to why it was deemed necessary to have twins.  There is one split-screen effect which duplicates Graville on the screen.  It isn’t very convincing, given one half of the image has some instability, but I can appreciate the effort being made at all on so slight a budget.

And this is obviously the product of very little money.   The studio behind this was Monogram, and there is good reason why it is considered one of the Poverty Row outfits.  There’s only a handful of sets, and even these are sparsely decorated.

Funny, but I would normally consider a low-budget to be a benefit to a noir, but that’s usually because other studios would take the approach of using real interiors and street shots.  Instead, we get threadbare sets and bad rear projection.  More frustrating are the subpar performances and writing, since there have always been plenty of starving artists who practice those arts. 

As for the plot, Castle had left the city because of the death of the “good” half of the twins.  His roommate and Army buddy is a likely suspect, as he is emotionally unbalanced and prone to blackouts.  That guy is played by Wally Cassell, and I like to think he and our lead were addressed only by last name on the set, which would doubtlessly cause a great deal of confusion. 

Also in the mix is John Litel and a man who somehow came to live with the comely young twins and their mother (Netta Packer), despite not being a relative or romantically involved with Packer.  Hovering around the edges of several scenes is a janitor played by Oliver Blake. 

The detective working the case is Regis Toomey, the only actor in this I recall seeing in anything before.  He’s a real piece of work, and is positioned as just as likely to have killed the girl as all but a couple of characters.  He seems to enjoy needling and irritating others, such as in a morgue scene where he tells Castle everything that happened to the victim after death.  I won’t go into the details here, but I think the corpse in Weekend at Bernie’s didn’t get around as much in comparison.

Typical of noir, the vast majority of the story is told in flashback, a device which is rarely necessary or even to the benefit of the film.  In this case, it is Castle telling his tale of woe to bartender Thomas E. Jackson.  As always with this kind of story structure, keep in mind everything we see should only be things this character was present for.  Similar to how found footage is hard to make fully convincing, anything violating the core constraint of this approach breaks the illusion.

The writing is hard-boiled and has glimmers of intelligence on occasion, though all attempts at being clever feel forced.  This starts as early as the introductory narration, where Castle tells us the streets smell like death.  What, pray tell, does death smell like, and does it happen to bring to mind one or more items from the menu of Arby’s?

The conclusion is unique, if only because it piles on more endings than Clue.  I’d wish you good luck in guessing in advance which one it will finally settle upon, but you’ll likely get a couple of them right, while surmising the very last one can only be done by sheer chance.  I went back and skimmed through the film the next day, and I’ll tell you this, what we are shown does not bear scrutiny after you have that answer.

The Guilty is an odd movie, one that feels significantly longer than its actual runtime. Even with so few characters, there is so much going on that I found it difficult to follow. Part of that is because almost all information is communicated through exposition instead of action. It is not even a visually interesting film, as there are few people on the screen at any time and they are usually in sets that are barely decorated. And it definitely doesn’t help when the actor in almost every scene is as unengaging as Don Castle.

Dir: John Reinhardt

Starring Bonita Granville, Don Castle, Regis Toomey

Watched on Flicker Alley blu-ray