Some Guys Just Don’t Like Women-A Lot- The Sniper- A Film Review

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

The Sniper, starring Adolph Menjou

I have been running the rack (a term learned in my pool hall days when I hung around with corner boys who hung around pool halls although I was never much of a player, mainly a hanger-on and bettor against Red Radley making many combinations and lost my shirt many times but in the long haul probably break a little less than even) on the old black and white film noir genre the past several years mainly grabbing stuff from the Netflix archives. At this point since I have been pretty steady in my attempts to see plenty of them I have moved down from, or been forced by Hollywood’s tastes to move down, the A classics like The Postman Always Rings Twice,  The Big Sleep, Out Of The Past and a few others and have hit the B-films of late. Maybe B minus as is the case here in this police procedural The Sniper.   

It is not that the subject matter is not important here, a surprising 1950s film which deals with a serious social issue-a man’s hatred, hatred to the point of murder, his social pathology against women just because they are women. So yes an attempt to deal with a social problem. The problem is that we get a very little, and that indirectly about what made our sniper, Jeff Mullins, go out and target, and I mean that literally, women for serial destruction. What we get is plenty of the police procedural part, the part where there is a maniac on the loose and the cops led by Inspector Dubois (played by Adolph Menjou in the twilight of his career) are one, maybe two steps behind until Jeff’s torment leaves him totally distraught. So when our cleansers’ delivery man, Jeff’s daytime job which allows him access to many women’s homes and to scout things before he totally goes off the wall and just randomly plucks them off the street, who had a previous history of torment and had been institutionalized goes on his spree the good Inspector and his men go out to try to figure this one out. They do in the end but I am still baffled by the lack of insight into why the guy was doing those serial shootings. I’ll  pass on saying more on this one.