Without Warning! (1952)

Best movie ever!

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Usually I'm wondering why a particular movie is rated as low as it is by IMDb reviewers. In this case I'm going just the opposite. The thing is, I can agree with a lot of the positive comments made about the film on this board, but for me, a lot of the situations presented didn't pass muster as being realistic. For example, when Carl Martin (Adam Williams) got spooked at the tailor shop when he brought his jacket in to get repaired, he wound up taking it home to destroy it. But why even consider getting it mended in the first place, knowing that a significant clue to his identity was probably left behind at the crime scene? And why wrap and tie it into a package? Didn't make sense to me.And then I got a kick out of Lieutenant Pete Hamilton's (Edward Binns) instructions to the women about to go undercover. Whenever asked a specific question on what they were supposed to do in given situations, virtually all of his answers were for them to figure it out themselves!And come on Jane Saunders (Meg Randall)! You knew instinctively this guy Carl Martin was a creep and you still went with him! Before that, when she found the garden shears in his desk drawer along with the newspaper clippings of his murders, she left them right there out in the open. Even when Martin turned his back on her, she could have ditched the shears or held on to them to defend herself if anything happened, but preferred to remain clueless. I just didn't think any of this was the way a rational person would have responded.Even so, I'm glad I came across this minor gem from the early Fifties, a film I had never heard of until running across it at my local library. It's a nifty addition to the list of noir films I've watched and reviewed here on IMDb, where my instinct about the picture was confirmed when I have them listed in order of their IMDb rating. It comes in at number sixty eight out of seventy nine films as I write this. So now I'm not so baffled having made my earlier comment.

I became aware of this film years ago from a passing reference to it in Carlos Clarens' 'Horror Movies', which had led me to assume that it was better known than it actually is.The maiden production of the company Levy-Gardner-Laven (later to become very active in TV), and the directorial debut of Arnold Laven, 'Without Warning!' isn't particularly original - following as it does in the well-worn footsteps of flavourful location-shot police procedurals like 'The Naked City'; and the ending wraps things up a little too abruptly. But as photographed by the veteran Joseph Biroc it treats us to a magnificent tour of some of the seamier parts of Los Angeles as they looked in 1951 (no crime film set in Los Angeles at this time, for example, became complete without a visit to its storm drains, which duly put in an appearance). One of many memorable images the film provides is the all-blonde police decoy squad who resemble something out of 'The Man from UNCLE'; and despite the ultra-noirish title sequence and the occasional night scene, much of the action actually takes place bathed in glorious Californian sunlight for a change.There are hints that the grip of the Breen Office was beginning to weaken (the wedding ring visibly worn by the blonde that Martin picks up in a bar, for example, would have been vetoed a few years earlier for depicting adultery), and the killer in this film is obviously motivated by sex; although the fact that we later learn that he's bearing a grudge at the blonde wife who left him makes him more of a sore loser than the all-out sadistic sex fiend the film initially promises (and doesn't really square with the glee he takes in reading about the case in the papers).Edward Binns, who plays the police lieutenant, will be most familiar to viewers as Juror 6 in '12 Angry Men', and both he and killer Adam Williams were in 'North by Northwest'; the former again playing a detective and the latter again playing a gardener.

This film noir is a typical Hollywood B picture of the early fifties, made on a low budget and with obscure talent. However, it works very well. It was the first film directed by Arnold Laven, whose subsequent career, which lasted until 1985, was mainly in American television series, although his second film was VICE SQUAD (1953), starring Edward G. Robinson and Paulette Goddard, so he was moving up from B status already. None of the actors in this film ever achieved significant status. The story concerns a psychotic serial killer, well played with suitably demented expressions and a great deal of tension by Carl Martin, who was jilted by a blonde of a certain type, so he repeatedly seeks out blondes who resemble her, in order to kill them and thus get back at her. From the beginning of the film, there is no secret about who the killer is, and we see him at work, stalking and stabbing the women to death with his garden shears (he is a professional gardener). The film is thus all about how they can identify and catch him, since his fingerprints are not on file and there are so few clues. The film lapses from time to time into a 'police procedural drama', but only briefly, and I suspect it was originally designed as one but then they decided to cut most of that out and just get on with the story, which was a good idea. For those who like early fifties noir, this film has a great deal of interest, is well made, and holds the attention.

The plot—a serial killer pursuing pretty blondes—is not exactly novel, however, the movie is better than I expected and very well done. Early on, the chase between cops and killer around the concrete jungle of LA freeways is both suspenseful and well staged. In fact the entire film appears to have been made on location, in parts of low-income east LA seldom seen on the Hollywood screen. For example, killer Martin's (Williams) slum-like hilltop neighborhood looks like the genuine thing, but with a good view of LA's downtown, plus the post-war grid of freeways slicing the urban landscape like concrete arteries.Williams low-keys his psychopathic killer with little change of expression. That way we don't know what's boiling up underneath. Neither, for that matter, are the killings exploited for shock value. Instead the emphasis is on suspense as we follow the police investigators' attempts to track down the madman before the pile of blonde corpses gets higher. The influence of documentary-like approach to police methods is evident throughout. This was, after all, the era of Dragnet on TV. The movie also has a number of good touches. For example, the police chemist who needles the detectives in low-key fashion lends interest to a potentially routine scene; or the little girl with her broken doll that lends poignant flavor to the seedy hilltop neighborhood.On the whole, the movie is done with care and imagination, and can hold its own with many of the better crime dramas of the day. One thing for sure, it at least merits inclusion in Leonard Maltin's too often unreliable movie guide. To me, it's a rather glaring omission even if it is an independent production with a no-name cast.