A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Monday, November 24, 2025

Guilty Bystander (Joseph Lerner, 1950)

Zachary Scott and Mary Boland in Guilty Bystander

Cast: Zachary Scott, Faye Emerson, Mary Boland, Sam Levene, J. Edward Bromberg, Kay Medford, Jed Prouty, Harry Landers, Elliott Sullivan, Ray Julian, Dennis Patrick. Screenplay: Don Ettinger, based on a novel by Whit Masterson and H. William Miller. Cinematography: Gerald Hirschfeld, Russell Harlan. Production design: Leo Kerz. Film editing: Geraldine Lerner. Music: Dimitri Tiomkin. 

Mary Boland made her name as a character actress playing dotty matrons like the Countess De Lave in The Women (George Cukor, 1939) and Mrs. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (Robert Z. Leonard, 1940), so it's fun to see her play against type as Smitty, the tough old bird who is the proprietor of a run-down residence hotel in Joseph Lerner's Guilty Bystander. She's entertaining to watch but it's more a collection of mannerisms and speech patterns borrowed from Marie Dressler, Mae West, and Jean Harlow than a credible character. But then the movie, a whodunit with an alcoholic ex-cop for protagonist, feels borrowed from a lot of sources, including the snarled plots and seedy milieus of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Zachary Scott is Max Thursday, Smitty's booze-sodden house detective. His ex-wife, Georgia (Faye Emerson), comes to him for help when their small son goes missing, along with her brother, Fred (Dennis Patrick). Rousing himself from his stupor, Thursday goes on a hunt that takes him into several hives of sleaze, gets him shot in the arm, and even leads him on a chase through the subway tunnels of New York City. The kidnapping turns out to have something to do with diamond smuggling, but atmosphere is more important to the film than plot. Good location shooting lifts Guilty Bystander above the routine, but not by much.  

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