Budd Boetticher

(On Cable TV, May 2022) As cheap and straight-ahead as B-grade film noir could be, The Killer is Loose doesn’t mess around in its scant 73 minutes. After a prologue in which a veteran helps rob a bank, sees his wife shot dead by a policeman and is sent to prison, the story gets going as the veteran kills a guard and escapes, his target obvious to all: the policeman’s wife. Director Budd Boetticher, working outside his more familiar western genre, turns in a no-frill genre exercise. Joseph Cotton is heroic enough as the policeman hero, but it’s Wendell Corey who’s more interesting as the wronged man on a revenge rampage. The relationship between the hero and his wife is not helped by the heavy dose of 1950s-style paternalism, but the complications are not bad, and it’s interesting for the film to move film noir thrills to the suburbs rather than the streets of the inner city. As a thriller, it still works rather well thanks to the strength of its antagonist. The rest of The Killer is Loose is competent but not overly complex or polished, which is not necessarily a flaw in that genre.