From the producer of High School Confidential which features many of the same cast and is set partly around the world of beatniks, but isn’t as nearly as much fun, mostly because the tone of the story is nasty and the ‘hero’ so unsympathetic. Ray Danton (very charismatic) is a rapist running loose, occasionally with best friend Jim Mitchum; Steve Cochran plays the investigating cop who is so misogynistic that he never believes the rapists victims – even when one of them turns out to be his wife.
Cochran is such a prick, nastily interrogating the victims (Danton frames them to make it seem like they ask for it) that it is uncomfortable – but the film doesn’t endorse his point of view (other, nicer characters call him on it), so in the end it makes the film more interesting, to have such a weird protagonist.
How weird? Instead of doing things like talking to witnesses and take fingerprints, he just follows the rape victims around because he “just knows” one will meet up with the rapist again. He turns out to be right – in this case the victim (or rather near victim) is Mamie Van Doren (who Jim Mitchum set out to rape but was held up by the fact Mamie was up for it).
It’s an intriguing story (Richard Matheson was one of the writers) on which the beat setting feels tacked on – Danton hangs out with beatniks but doesn’t really dig their scene. The finale has Cochran chasing Danton but they kept being interrupted by partying beatniks then they fight it out underwater.
To throw some extra stuff into the mix, Louis Armstrong sings the title song about beatniks and appears in a scene (Cochrane asks him to make a phone call for him – why don’t you do it yourself, Armstrong?), Cochrane’s wife gets pregnant to the rapist and we have a scene where a priest talks her out of getting an abortion, the cast includes Vampira as a poet. A bit of a mess, but for all that a watchable film, quite grown up and serious in places, particularly about men’s attitude to women and rape.
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