Richard Fleischer

Armored Car Robbery

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Mastermind Dave making a hoax call

Let’s hear it for Plod. With a bit of bad luck, a dangerous dame and a drop of hubris thrown in for good measure, that’s the idea behind Armored Car Robbery. Detail, detail, detail is the USP. The villains may be smart but the cops have something the bad guys don’t have – persistence. They do not give up and in the end it’s shoe leather and blunt-force cop procedure that does for a gang who – no surprise, surely – have carried out a robbery on an armoured car. First we meet the criminal mastermind, David Purvis (William Talman), outside Chigago’s Wrigley Field baseball stadium, where he’s just put in a call to … Read more

The Clay Pigeon

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Jim Fletcher wakes up in a hospital bed with someone trying to strangle him

The issues are fascinating but the plotting swings about like a thing demented in The Clay Pigeon, a paranoid thriller written by Carl Foreman, of High Noon and The Bridge on the River Kwai fame, and directed by Richard Fleischer, estimable names both. Bill Williams plays a soldier who wakes up from a coma only to be told he’s about to be court-martialled for murder and treason for turning a fellow soldier over to the Japanese when both were PoWs. Since Jim Fletcher (Williams) has amnesia, he has no idea what the charges are all about but he is clear-minded enough to know he’s in a fix. Climbing out of his hospital bed … Read more

Follow Me Quietly

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Ann and Harry with a blank-faced mystery killer

Follow Me Quietly is only one hour long and so desperate to use its time well that it’s already running its first scene beneath the opening credits – a woman walking to and fro in the rain. From the way she’s pacing, and shielding the glowing end of a cigarette like a soldier in a trench, we can tell she’s a femme fatale. Inside the next five minutes all the other key characters have been introduced in a similarly concise way, by which point we know this is a thriller about a serial killer called the Judge, and that this is a story about driven characters – the killer, the cop on his … Read more

The Narrow Margin

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Charles McGraw and Marie Windsor

Dangers on a train? If it’s jeopardy on board a speeding locomotive you want, The Narrow Margin is the way to go. Made for buttons, shot in 13 days and with no big tentpole stars, it made the name of director Richard Fleischer, a B-movie guy bumped straight up to the big time once it eventually debuted. “Eventually” because RKO’s owner Howard Hughes sat on it for two years. There are many theories as to why – one prime candidate is that he was going to reshoot bits of it with bigger names to capitalise on its obvious qualities. Another that the film got caught up in Hughes’s machinations as he tried to … Read more