Watch The Clay Pigeon For Free

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

**SPOILERS** Snappy little known film noir thriller involving amnesia victim US Navy man and former Japanese POW inmate Jim Fletcher, Bill Williams. It's Fletcher who's to stand trial for treason as soon as he's recovered enough to be released from the Naval Hospital he's a patient in.Were kept in the dark to exactly what Fletcher did until he escapes from the hospital and gets in touch with is best friends Matt's, and fellow Japanese POW, wife Martha Gregory, Barbara Hale. It's through Martha that Fletcher expects to find out just what all the fuss is about him being a traitor to his country! It's then that we find out that it was Matt whom Fletcher was reported to have turned over to the Japanese for stealing food out of the POW camps mess hall! For that "herrndous" crime Matt was both tortured and executed by the Japs for not only theft but wanton disrespect for the mighty Japanese Empire and its God-like leader Emperor Hirohito!Not for one moment believing, but just playing along with him, a word of what Fletcher says about him being innocent in her husbands death Martha is later convinced in that he's telling the truth when both her and Fletcher are almost run off the road, after he kidnapped her, by these two thugs who were tailing them. It's later when o the lamb when both Martha and Fletcher are dining in this L,A Chinese Restaurant, the White Lotus, that the truth comes out to what all this mystery of Fletcher being a traitor to his country is really all about! That's when the owner non other then Ken "the Weasel" Tokoyama, Richard Loo, dropped in to pick up the weekly receipts! It was the Weasel who was in charge of the Japanese prison camp that Fletcher and Matt were held in! Not only that it's the Weasel who can prove Fletcher's innocence by exposing the real traitor who ratted out Matt, in him raiding the camp mess hall, to his Japanese captors!Had hitting thriller with the confused, due to his amnesia, Jim Fletcher on the run and at the same time trying to find out the truth to who set him up in being accused in turning in his best friend Matt Gregory to the Japanese who later had him executed! The only chance, besides the Weasel, that Fetcher has to prove his innocence is to contact his friend and former POW Ted Niles, Richard Quinn,in L.A who can prove that he was in fact a "Good Joe" who stuck by his fellow POWS through thick & thin. That's in Niles himself being together with both Fletcher and Matt in the Jap prison camp and knowing that he wouldn't under any circumstances, even the threat of death, turn over his friends, like Matt and himself, to the Japs to be tortured and executed!***SPOILERS*** The film gets even more stranger when it comes out that the Weasel is now, four years after the war, working with the L.A mob in a plan to get their hands on some 100 million dollars of US counterfeit currency that was stashed, before the attack on Pearl Harbr, in a secret safe house by the Japanese Government to be used to undermine the US economy when the war broke out! Heart-stopping final as Fletcher now held hostage by the Weasel and one of his accomplices fights for his life in preventing the Weasel & Co. from throwing him off a speeding train that he was tricked into boarding!

Excellent 'B' noir - from the memorable opening sequence of a close-up of a sleeping man's face, with a couple of hands entering the frame to strangle him, to the exciting train-ride climax, which curiously anticipates the director's own THE NARROW MARGIN (1952) - with a topical, Hitchcockian plot of an amnesiac war veteran, accused of treason and of being party to murder, who goes on the run to prove his innocence. Despite unknown leads (including Bill Williams and Barbara Hale, a married couple in real-life and the parents of BUTCH AND SUNDANCE: THE EARLY DAYS [1979] star William Katt, which I unwittingly watched the very same day, and future director Richard Quine!), it's very stylishly handled by an expert in the genre, with special care given to the hero's hallucinatory flashes of his harrowing experiences in a Japanese P.O.W. camp.

Richard Fleischer who would direct "Barabbas" "fantastic voyage" and "the Boston strangler,not exactly low budget efforts already proves with "clay pigeon" he was a great director from the start.One has sometimes the strange impression to watch a "Mandchurian candidate" in miniature .A nightmarish atmosphere ,a true film noir where trains and cars belt in the night,where an amnesic hero has to fight an unknown enemy .It's really a tour de force to pack so much action (and much of what happens works behind the scenes) in a very short flick (about an hour).The last scenes on the train were probably influenced by Hitchcock's "shadow of a doubt" .This little gem should not be missed.

When Bill Williams comes out of a coma at a Naval hospital in Long Beach, he knows who he is but doesn't know why he's there. But he overhears staff talking about his impending court-martial for treason: Apparently he snitched on his fellow Americans in a Japanese prison-camp, leading to their deaths by torture. No fool he, he grabs some civvies and slips out the door, headed to San Diego and the widow (Barbara Hale) of one of his dead buddies.She's understandably unhappy to see him and even more so when he binds and gags her, then heads north to Los Angeles in her car, with her in it. When pursuers almost run them off the road and down a ravine, she starts to believe his story about being innocent. In L.A., he enlists the aid of another survivor (Richard Quine), who advises him to lay low as the `Old Lady' (the Navy) is watching them both.Then one evening in the White Lotus, a `chop-suey joint' oddly run by Japanese, he spots among them the most sadistic of the guards, nicknamed `the Weasel.' Soon he finds himself the fall guy, or clay pigeon, in a transpacific scheme to launder millions in counterfeit currency printed in anticipation of Japanese victory and occupation. Its operations come very close to him....The Clay Pigeon is another of the trim and stripped-down noir thrillers churned out by Richard Fleischer in the post-war years. While not as deftly worked out as Armored Car Robbery or The Narrow Margin, it clocks in at just over an hour and delivers the goods. Its stars, Williams and Hale, were married at the time and would remain so until his death. Among their children is actor William Katt (Williams' birth name), the spit-and-image of his dad. Hale, of course, had a long run as Perry Mason's gal Friday, and Raymond Burr named an orchid he cultivated after her - not Della Street, but Barbara Hale.