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Simply Perfect

Sick Product of a Sick System

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

"The Missing Juror" was one of Columbia's "filler" movies, usually made in about 12 days for around $100,000 and designed to fill out a double bill. Budd Boetticher, the director, gave the film flair and individuality. It was only his second directorial credit (his first was a Boston Blackie mystery "One Mysterious Night") and he had fond memories of the movie and it's stars. He thought Janis Carter was wonderful and could have been a top star if only she had learned to "play the game". It also really advanced the career of George MacCready along the ranks of memorable movie villains.At a suburban railway crossing, a shadowy figure props the body of a man behind the wheel of a car as a train hurtles into it!! The murdered man is the fifth person to die from a jury that condemned an innocent man to death. Newspaper man, Joe Keats (Jim Bannon) has always been convinced of his innocence but even though there are appeals and submissions, Harry Wharton (MacCready) is found guilty. When the first juryman is shot, he confesses to Keats that Wharton has been framed and as a result of new evidence he is released. But Harry is a changed man, imprisonment has sent him insane and while incarcerated in the State Mental Hospital, he sets fire to the ward and hangs himself - or does he???Keats is still investigating the juror's deaths and comes to know one of them, Alice (Janis Carter). She is not at all interested in him but is interested in Mr. Jerome K. Bentley, the mysterious jury foreman, who has a strange fetish for the number 12!!! Unlike a lot of the reviewers I thought it was a pretty good thriller - not Noir but definitely not mediocre!! Of course Keats takes an immediate dislike to Bentley but still takes up his invitation of a visit to the steam baths - Big Mistake!!! They are met by Colly (Mike Mazurki), the proprietor who proceeds to give Bentley his nightly neck massage while reciting Oscar Wilde's "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" - as if that isn't enough to make Keats suspicious, he almost comes to a steamy end in the actual baths. Meanwhile Bentley has lured Alice to his home on the pretense of pretending to hire her to redecorate it - Keats can't go running to the rescue as he has been mistakenly jailed so it is up to Alice's faithful room-mate Tex (Jean Stevens) - who is smarter than the two leads and should have been on the case from the start. She makes a few phone calls which lead to a happy ending. Jim Bannon, after starting out in thrillers ("The Soul of a Monster", "I Love a Mystery") quickly found a home in the West, particularly TV, with shows like "The Range Rider" and "The Adventures of Champion".

NOTE: Don't read the cast credit on IMDb or this movie won't even be a mystery for the first 15 minutes.For the first 15 minutes I thought this movie was not bad (not good, but at least a reasonable example of the B mystery movie genre). The problem occurs in minute 16, or thereabout, when the movie starts to telegraph it's punch so clearly that only an idiot wouldn't see who the killer really is, and what the wrap up is going to be. After that you can turn the movie off, except that stopping is like ceasing to watch a bad accident that you know you shouldn't be looking at. Actually, a bad accident is a lot more interesting than this movie.I won't give away the "surprise". Instead I'll let you participate in the contest to see if you can guess what I was able to figure out by the time of the fire in the mental hospital. It was so obvious that you would have be from Mars to not figure it out.I like a good bad movie, but this isn't one of those. Try some other movie with "Juror" in the title - any other movie with "Juror" in the title.

The story may have more holes than Grandma's sieve, but it's still worth catching up with. For one, it's got cult actress Janis Carter who always shows more eyeball than ought to be legally allowed, along with the high-class George Macready just then perfecting his mad cackle-- and whoever in production thought his cultured voice was not a dead give-a-way. It's also one of director Buddy Boetticher's first outings, and already he's a camera master—catch those graceful dolly moves across the cut-a-way rooms. Then there's literary muscleman and masseuse Mike Mazurki throttling Macready's face blue while on a flight of poetic abandon. I just wish some of that imagination had carried over to repairing the story holes, like how crank-confessor Trevor Bardette knows so many details of the killings. Speaking of Bardette, his highly enthused performance suggests A-grade pay for a B-grade movie, making his mad lather a movie high point. Clearly, the 50-dollar budget didn't go into lighting since some scenes resemble a bat's cave and require the eyes of one to make out what's happening. Nonetheless, the film has almost as many promising noirish elements as the classic Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)—as another reviewer aptly compares. Too bad someone didn't send the script down to Rewrite for some hole-plugging plaster.

Though it wasn't part of the "I Love a Mystery" series (that wouldn't start at Columbia until the next year) "The Missing Juror" has the same writer, Charles "Blackie" O'Neal (Ryan O'Neal's father), and the same star, Jim Bannon. It also has the same breezy unconcern with plot credibility; like his script for the first "I Love a Mystery" movie, O'Neal's screenplay literally makes no sense, as well as being structured around one man impersonating another (I know I'm treading on the thin edge of "spoiler" here but IMDb's cast list actually gives the game away anyway) and supposedly not being recognized by two leads who know both people well. What saves this movie is George Macready's malevolent performance and, above all, Budd Boetticher's direction: Boetticher and cinematographer L. W. O'Connell take the film noir look to such extremes that some scenes are played out in almost pitch-black darkness and only flashes of light, along with the voices on the soundtrack, clue us in as to what's supposed to be going on. It's a pity Boetticher later specialized in Westerns and didn't make many more noirs — he was damned good at them!