Experiment in Terror (Blake Edwards, 1962

Lee Remick and Ross Martin in Experiment in Terror

Cast: Lee Remick, Glenn Ford, Ross Martin, Stefanie Powers, Roy Poole, Ned Glass, Anita Loo, Patricia Huston, Gilbert Green, Clifton James, Al Avalon, William Bryant, Dick Crockett, James Lanphier. Screenplay: Gordon Gordon, Mildred Gordon, based on their novel. Cinematography: Philip H. Lathrop. Art direction: Robert Peterson. Film editing: Patrick McCormack. Music: Henry Mancini.

Experiment in Terror is a moody but slackly paced thriller that was the first film directed by Blake Edwards after his smash hit Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). He would follow it up with another dark but more successful movie, Days of Wine and Roses (1962), also starring Lee Remick, but he became best known for his lighter work, especially the series of Peter Sellers comedies that began with The Pink Panther in 1963. Experiment in Terror begins well, with Kelly Sherwood (Remick) arriving home from her job in a San Francisco bank only to be trapped in her garage by a man who threatens to kill her or her sister if she doesn't help him steal $100,000 from the bank. It's an intense, well-played scene, filmed with some harrowing long-take closeups of Remick and the shadowy figure of the man, who speaks with a kind of raspy wheeze. This is all she can really tell the FBI when she defies the man's order not to contact the police. The agent who takes her call, John Ripley (Glenn Ford), immediately sets in motion an attempt to identify and trap the man, whose identity becomes clearer to us only as it becomes clearer to the G-men. He's "Red" Lynch, played very creepily by Ross Martin, a character actor familiar from TV, on which he had a recurring role in a series created by Edwards, Mr. Lucky, in 1959 and 1960, and would later gain more fame as Artemus Gordon on the late '60s series The Wild Wild West. In the course of the film, Red terrorizes and murders another woman before finally getting shot down on the pitcher's mound after a Giants-Dodgers game at the late, unlamented Candlestick Park in San Francisco, one of several locations used to good effect in the film. Unfortunately, a lot of the burden of the film falls on Ford, who gives a bland, colorless performance as Ripley, and Edwards doesn't build suspense effectively. Some of the fault of the film may lie in its screenplay by the married writing couple known as The Gordons, adapting their own novel. What life the film has comes from Remick and Martin, from Philip H. Lathrop's views of San Francisco, and from a score by Edwards's frequent collaborator, Henry Mancini.

Drive a Crooked Road (Richard Quine, 1954)

Mickey Rooney and Dianne Foster in Drive a Crooked Road

Cast: Mickey Rooney, Dianne Foster, Kevin McCarthy, Jack Kelly, Harry Landers, Paul Picerni, Dick Crockett. Screenplay: Blake Edwards, Richard Quine, based on a story by James Benson Nablo. Cinematography: Charles Lawton Jr. Art direction: Walter Holscher. Film editing: Jerome Thoms. Music: George Duning.

Mickey Rooney, usually the most ebullient, not to say overbearing, of actors, gives a subtle, reined-in performance in Drive a Crooked Road as a shy, quiet auto mechanic and amateur race-car driver who is seduced into becoming the getaway driver for bank robbers. But the film is also subtextually about sex in that most ostensibly repressed of decades, the 1950s. Rooney's Eddie Shannon works in a repair shop where the fellow mechanics gather at the windows and hoot lasciviously at any passing "dame." One mechanic even slobbers on the plate glass. They poke fun at Eddie, whom they call "Shorty" for obvious reasons, because he doesn't follow suit, questioning him on his sex life. The pack behavior suggests that any male who doesn't behave the way they do must be "queer." And then one day a beautiful woman named Barbara Mathews (Dianne Foster) shows up at the auto shop wanting her car checked out and asks for Eddie by name. She flirts with him, and though he responds with shy embarrassment, she calls on him again the next day, after he has repaired her car, to say that she can't start it. So he pays Barbara a visit at her apartment, fixes the connection that had somehow come loose, and gets flirted with a bit more. Gradually, she breaks down his reticence and, though even at the height of their relationship he's still so awkward that he doesn't even kiss her good night, he's hooked. We know by now that she's up to something, and we find out that her real boyfriend, Steve Norris (Kevin McCarthy), who had seen Eddie in an auto race, needs a driver who can negotiate the backroads between Palm Springs and the highway to Los Angeles, so he and his friend Harold (Jack Kelly) can rob a bank and make their getaway before the police have time to set up a roadblock. Barbara has grown ashamed of deceiving Eddie, but she's forced to go through with the plan of persuading him to take part in the job. This can't end well for anyone, and surprisingly for a Hollywood film of the era, it doesn't. Drive a Crooked Road lags a bit in its storytelling and doesn't build the suspense it should, but the performances are good. And the sexual subtext is what makes the film fascinating. In the depiction of Eddie's repressed sexuality, there's a suggestion that he may be afraid that he really is gay, just as there are suggestions that Steve and Harold may be more than just friends. The rampant machismo of the garage mechanics is also present in Steve's treatment of Barbara, whom he expects to do his bidding come what may. Sometimes hindsight makes a film more interesting than it was when it was released.

Days of Wine and Roses (Blake Edwards, 1962)

This melodrama about alcoholic codependency threatens to fall into didacticism, becoming a latter-day temperance lecture, but is rescued by the fine performances of Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as Joe and Kirsten Clay. He's a ladder-climbing public relations man and she's the secretary to one of his clients; they fall in love, get married, have a child, and turn into self-destructive lushes. Eventually, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, and after a couple of harrowing relapses, he climbs out of it, but she refuses to admit that she has a problem that can't be solved with "will power." The film is unexpectedly bleak for one made with a solid Hollywood budget and two big stars -- both of whom received Oscar nominations -- directed by a man more famous for the Pink Panther movies and for his marriage to (and films with) Julie Andrews than for a serious problem drama. Fortunately, the film has a point to make: that alcoholism is a disease that manifests itself differently in each person who suffers from it. Joe, being a sociable type whose job has always involved drinking with clients, is the kind of person who benefits from the sense of community that AA provides. Kirsten, on the other hand, is a loner: an only child with a doting father (Charles Bickford), who when we first see her doesn't drink at all and is given to taking long walks alone on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. It's Joe who introduces her to alcohol, which softens the rough edges of life -- without it, she says, everything looks "dirty." She feels comfortable denying her problem, even when it affects her marriage and her child so severely: At one point, she sets fire to their apartment in an alcoholic haze. They love each other, but she's unable to express her love for Joe unless he drinks with her. The screenplay by JP Miller is a reworking of his TV drama that appeared on Playhouse 90 in 1958, starring Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie. There is a bit too much Hollywood gloss on the film, including an Oscar-winning title song by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, but the thoughtful core of the narrative manages to surface because everyone resisted the tendency to paste an easy resolution of the Clays' problems on the end of the film.