Proto-Dirty Harry from the killer's POV (complete with city officials telling cops they are loose cannons)! Loser Eddie Miller lives in a bedsit and drives a laundry truck throughout San Francisco, sizing up potential targets as he delivers their duds. Like another one of our Columbia Film Noir Classics box set anti-heroes, he hates women, too: the sight of one sets off a tug of war between his mind and his demented hands that want to assemble his rifle & get shooting! The Sniper is quickly paced and punctuated with brilliant scenes, like the one pictured above where he gets his hate on by throwing balls in an aggressive frenzy and dunks the lady in the tank over and over.
This film, a "Stanely Kramer Production" is dressed up as a message movie advocating for help for mentally deranged violent offenders. Whether Kramer believed that it was high time a movie seriously addressed this subject, I don't know (he was responsible for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Judgment at Nuremberg, films so humorless I'm tempted to think he did). Luckily though this one was directed by a man who knew a few things about directing, Edward Dmytryk. I had been thinking I was glad to not live in the 50s when good old fashioned crime flicks were dressed up as being educational but then I thought about how most films publicly lauded in barf-fests like the Oscars openly embrace this kind of schlock (hello Blind Side, Crazy Heart, Invictus, etc), hammering audiences relentlessly with social messages. Alcohol is wrong! Racism is bad! So thank God that at least The Sniper only gives us a lecture before and after but lets us revel in a well-crafted pulp flick for the remaining 85 minutes!
Eddie is cheered on by a crowd of goons.
No comments:
Post a Comment