Mill Creek is a media distributor which gets a great deal of cinema and television onto DVD and bluray, much of which would be unlikely to find release on physical media if not for them. They get a lot of flak for most of their releases being bare bones. I have also read complaints about the quality of their video and audio mastering, though I have not detected any such issues with their work I have seen so far.
As a sucker for all film noir, I have all three volumes of their Noir Archive three disc sets, each disc of which has three films on it. I don’t know if somebody at the company believes in numerology, but it wouldn’t surprise me. As we learned from Schoolhouse Rock, three is a magic number.
What unites these films is they all appear to have been distributed by Columbia Pictures, a studio I have repeatedly heard described as “the most major of the minors”. But that doesn’t mean they necessarily made bad movies. Financial constraints instead led them to specialize in the kind of crime B-movies now largely labelled as “noir”.
Still, there are few diamonds in the roughs of these Mill Creek sets. I had already watched the first two of these three-disc sets before I started this blog, and I doubt I will be re-watching any of the selections just to write about them. So, instead, I’m starting with 1957’s The Shadow on the Window, the first picture of the last set.
This is a rather odd film, though not so much as to be especially notable. Philip Carey plays a L.A. police detective looking for his missing wife (Betty Garrett). He doesn’t know it, but three thugs (John Drew Barrymore, Corey Allen and Gerald Sarracini) are holding her hostage in a remote farmhouse. All Carey knows is his young son (Jerry Mathers—yes, the kid from Leave It to Beaver) has shown up at the station shocked and speechless.
Nobody can get Mathers to communicate. Much of the film has Carey following, in reverse, the circuitous route his son took to get there. It’s like a detective has to follow a trail left by Billy in one of those recurring gags from the old Family Circus comic. Honestly, this investigation, during which the picture becomes a straight police procedural, is kind of tedious.
How Garrett ended up at the farmhouse is she went there for a dictation gig. Not sure what a guy who appears to be a farmer needed a stenographer for, but that’s moot.
Like I was saying earlier, Garrett, who looks to be pushing 40 (while supposedly 27) is the hostage of three “teen” boys (all of whom look to be pushing 30) after they robbed and accidentally killed the owner of the house. She keeps telling them they should leave while they have the chance. Barrymore is convinced they can’t let her live. It goes back and forth like this for a long time.
And that’s really all there is to it. The Shadow on the Window isn’t bad, but it feels like two rather dull films rolled into one. It definitely isn’t as exciting as anything the title might suggest. For most of the runtime, I was thinking about an exchange between two cops watching over Mathers before they learn who his dad is. One of them makes a wisecrack speculating Mathers “stole city hall”. Now that’s a movie I want to see.
Dir: William Asher
Starring Philip Carey, Betty Garrett, Jerry Mathers
Watched on Mill Creek blu-ray box set Noir Archive Volume 3: 1957-1960