Among the Living (1941)

That was an excellent one.

Lack of good storyline.

Excellent but underrated film

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Albert Dekker stars in a dual role in "Among the Living" from 1941, which also stars Susan Hayward and Francis Farmer.Dekker plays John and Paul Raden, part of an important family - in fact, the town is called Radentown. Paul supposedly died when he was 10 years old. However, he was discovered to be mentally unstable and was locked in a secret room in the Raden Mansion.When John Raden and his wife (Farmer) return for the Raden patriarch's funeral, they learn that Paul is alive.Paul escapes after killing his caretaker and takes off into town, renting a room, where he meets the landlady's daughter (Hayward). Childlike and unschooled in social graces, Paul gives her money and tells her to buy a new dress. She's no idiot and takes him for a real ride.After a night in a club, a woman is found murdered, and the hunt for the killer is on.Decent film with noir touches and a dash of horror, and an excellent performance by Dekker who gives an individuality to both twins. Susan Hayward really pops - frankly, I prefer her earlier films, when she was fresh and sexy, as opposed to the harder characters she played later. Here she's a real scene-stealer.I have a quibble with what happened toward the end - I really didn't understand the lynch mob mentality. It seemed over the top.Albert Dekker was a prominent stage actor who died a strange death. During his career, he turned in some very good film, television, and Broadway performances. This was a good showcase for him.All in all, pretty good.

The plot to "Among the Living" is silly and impossible to believe. However, it does appear to be the inspiration for an episode of "The Simpsons"--the one where Bart discovers that he has an identical 'evil' twin who's been locked in the attic for many years! Homer and Marge feed Hugo fish heads and have kept his existence a secret for years! Who would have thought a film would have dared have such a bizarro plot?!When the film begins, the family patriarch dies and his son John (Albert Dekker) arrives for the funeral. Little does John know that his identical brother, Paul (also Dekker), is STILL alive and did not die as a small child. The family doctor (Harry Carey) divulges the family secret to John...Paul is still alive and insane and has been kept hidden in a secret room in the family mansion! Coincidentally, at this same time, Paul kills his keeper and escapes! Now two identical looking guys are running about town...and one is on occasion unpredictable and homicidal. So it's up to the Doctor and John to try to find Paul...however the heartless Doctor soon tries to stop John from contacting the police by threatening to destroy him! However, Paul is not intend with only killing his keeper...and the bodies start piling up in town. And, soon John is assumed to be the crazed killer by mistake!As I mentioned above, the plot for this one is just insane...so you really have to suspend disbelief in order to watch this one. Despite this, I did enjoy Dekker's performance as he played both characters, particularly Paul, quite well. Goofy and still very watchable.

Long before 'The Parent Trap' we get some great split-screen special effects of Albert Dekker playing twins in this 1941 early Noir. But, it seems Dekker did such a great job of playing two starring roles in this film, that he spent most of the rest of his long career playing bit parts. He wasn't really that bad . . . or that good. Not the greatest film ever but worth a watch just for the wild vigilante mob that becomes the star of the show and is reminiscent of 'Frankenstein.' Plus how can you go wrong with a sweet innocent lead heroine named Mollie Pickens and several scenes with a newsboy walking down the street shouting, "Extra, Extra . . ." to help move the plot along?

I’d always been interested in this one – not least because it involves twins (and, thus, reminiscent of the Boris Karloff vehicle THE BLACK ROOM [1935]) – so that when I came across the film, even if I knew that the quality would be far from optimal, I leapt at the chance to acquire it. While not strictly horror, it involves several elements that are part and parcel of the genre – old dark house, family secret, madness, murder, mob fury, etc.Despite, as I said, the fact that the video was rather fuzzy – so that the images generally lacked detail – I was nonetheless struck by the film’s cinematography and editing: these were particularly effective during a scene at a bar, where the mad brother (who had been secluded all his life but has now broken loose) is ridiculed by the customers, and the one following it where he chases a girl into an alley and kills her. The two central roles are played by Albert Dekker and he does very well by both, though the mad brother is obviously the showier character – which he invests with a remarkable vulnerability (when seeing the locals indulging in a particularly animated jitterbug routine, he naively asks his future victim who’s accompanying him at the time “What are they doing?”); incidentally, despite the narrative’s Gothic – or, more precisely, Southern – trappings, the setting is a contemporary one.The supporting cast is a good one and includes: a young Susan Hayward (that is, before she became, the First Lady of Screen Melodrama) as the perky small-town girl who entrances the crazy Dekker – which she’s all-too-willing to play up to, but who promptly and fiercely turns against him when he’s eventually revealed to be the cause of the terror which has gripped the community!; Harry Carey in the ambivalent role of the town doctor who, having been complicit in the cover-up of the mad brother’s existence, fears the repercussions of this act if he were to intervene when – at the satisfactorily frenzied climax – the good Dekker is accused of his brother’s crimes!; and the troubled Frances Farmer who, however, is wasted in the colorless role of the innocent sibling’s wife (in a virtual prerequisite of genre heroines, the actress is also asked to scream – which she does unconvincingly! – in her one scene with the mad Dekker).The film is a Paramount production and, therefore, currently owned by Universal; while the latter have served their horror back-catalogue reasonably well on DVD, the equivalent stuff from that other studio has been consistently (and bafflingly) neglected over the years – especially since this includes such highly-desirable titles as ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932), MURDERS IN THE ZOO (1933) and, now, AMONG THE LIVING itself...