Watch The Sniper For Free

Highly Overrated But Still Good

A lot of fun.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

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

THE SNIPER is undoubtedly one of the top film noir dramas from the fifties-- and certainly one of the finest that Columbia ever produced. Impeccable cast, sharp direction, and a very suspenseful story--how can you wrong?And things kick off brilliantly as soon as we fade in. From the opening shot, where we are introduced to the main character pulling the drawer out to see the rifle, all the way to the celebrated final shot-- it's a story that holds your attention from start to finish.This was the first of nine occasions where director Edward Dmytryk would work with star Arthur Franz, who plays the troubled title character. It certainly helped that Franz wasn't allowed a showy or over-the-top performance, like we might find by Richard Widmark or Dan Duryea. The sniper could easily have been the guy next door, that's what is so grim about it.Probably the best part, though, is not the ending. It happens maybe fifteen minutes or so before the end of the movie. It's where he fires the rifle at the man painting the tall tower/chimney. The guy must have been 12 stories up. At first, when the painter is hit, he falls rather slowly-- then in the last few feet, he plummets quickly to the ground. It's very shocking. In fact, I think this part of THE SNIPER is more harrowing to watch than anything in VERTIGO where Hitchcock often uses rather artificial-looking process shots. Talk about dizzying heights! And the way it's staged with Franz's character watching from the bottom left hand corner of the frame, seeing that he's brought the painter down with such a sudden act of violence, sends chills down your spine. What great stunt work.

The heart of this well-mannered crime film is an outwardly normal young man who is, alas, as a preamble describes, "an enemy of womankind." On some inexplicable basis, he has a fuming bitterness against women that he dispatches, in cyclic phases, by shooting dames he spots from windows and rooftops as they walk the streets. Of course, this is alarming to the local public, and much civil distress is conveyed for the assassin to be caught. This is the incentive for greater pressure in the pursuit by the police and also for some reductive information on the issue of the sex offender.Stanley Kramer might have benefited from knowing his bounds. As a director, he had a masterful formality that left indelible images and ethical questions in our hearts. As a producer, he invariably fails to take both feet out of the director's tub and unfortunately straddles his job of protecting the director's vision with his insistence upon his own. Edward Dmytryk's direction stands astride the studio standard of storytelling and the immediacy of low-budget location shooting, and he intersperses the violence with lucid bangs of vicious power without showing one bead of blood. Regrettably however, the film is utterly scared that its ideas and points will go overlooked. Dmytryk, or should I say Kramer, batters them in, scene after scene.I can almost understand Kramer's transparent imposition upon John Cassavetes' A Child is Waiting or Hubert Cornfeld's Pressure Point, because they were films born out of his own strong conscience regarding patent social issues. The Sniper is, granted, a film about a disturbed character, likely tormented by a past of being misunderstood, rejected, outcast, but a level-headed gaze at this character through Dmytryk's voyeuristic passages need no further elevation. A grave lecture to society for not doing enough to imprison and rehabilitate the budding sex criminal is dutifully articulated in this visually innovative B film. But the sermon is neatly bookish and theoretical. It feels like just a noble pretext for trying a somewhat altered slant on a straightforward manhunt story.Kramer may stultify the impact of this drama, but Dmytryk gets his main guy Arthur Franz through desperate, haywire emotional transitions crisply, even if it's more through the director's venerated editing approach than any naturalism on the part of Franz. All I know is that I remember quite a few of his wordless scenes more vividly than those where Adolphe Menjou and a room full of suits are moralizing and lecturing one another.

Almost twenty years before San Francisco was terrorized by another sniper in Dirty Harry, this well received B film from Columbia Pictures painted a far less glamorous picture of a mentally ill individual taking his problems out on the world. Arthur Franz got his career role in The Sniper and a pity it didn't elevate him to stardom although he certainly had a distinguished and long career.Franz paints us a portrayal of a socially challenged man who just can't get anywhere with the opposite sex. He conceives a pathological hatred of all women and an innocent encounter with a nightclub performer played by Marie Windsor finally triggers him off. After that Franz is on a rampage, killing women almost at random from various San Francisco rooftops. The film was shot on location in San Francisco and The Sniper bears a whole lot of resemblance to The Naked City where Jules Dassin made New York's mean streets as much a star as the human players. Director Edward Dmytryk does the same for San Francisco.And the cops here are much like Barry Fitzgerald and Don Taylor from that film. Watching the film I wonder how much persuasion it took to get Adolphe Menjou to shave off that famous wax mustache of his, a remnant of fashion from a bygone era. It certainly wouldn't have gone with his role as a homicide cop. But the voice is distinctive and Menjou put it over. Acting as his younger sidekick is Gerald Mohr.What's ironic in The Sniper is that the whole thing is a desperate cry for help to a world to busy to care. The minor key ending of The Sniper brings that point home quite vividly.The Sniper is a noir classic, not as glamorous as Dirty Harry Callahan's pursuit of another twisted individual through San Francisco, but a whole lot more realistic.

Beginning with sexual assault statistics by men against women (as if only females fell prey to sexual assault!)--which really don't have much to do with the story that follows--"The Sniper" is irrevocably dated, and often so over-heated that it is occasionally funny unintentionally. Co-producers Edward and Edna Anhalt also concocted this melodrama about a disturbed young man (Arthur Franz) in San Francisco, released too soon from the prison mental ward while serving jail time, who gets hostile when he sees displays of sweetheart-affection in public. Worse, he makes women defensive in one-on-one conversation, eventually pegging them as targets to be eliminated; he isn't sexually aggressive, he's a people-hater (though the scenarists curiously lump these two types together). A crack shot with his rifle, Franz secretly pleads for someone to take notice of him, yet bodies begin piling up before police lieutenant Adolphe Menjou puts two and two together. Exceptionally well-made low-budget item has gleaming Burnett Guffey cinematography and some effective moments. The script doesn't do the production justice however, and Franz isn't directed properly (he looks continually unsure of himself). The snippets of chit-chat we hear on the street are amusingly jaded, cynical, and woefully theatrical. Still, the violence depicted was ahead of its time, and is carried off without too much exploitive fervor. ** from ****