Terror Street (1953)

aka 36 Hours

Directed by Montgomery Tully
Written by Steve Fisher
Starring
- Dan Duryea
- Elsy Albiin
- Ann Gudrun
- Eric Pohlmann
- John Chandos
Produced by Anthony Hinds

In the early ’50s, American producer/distributor Robert L. Lippert made a deal with a fresh British production company with the unlikely name of Hammer Films to crank out a dozen or so low-budget B-movie crime-dramas (some more noir than others) for the American market. The U.S. half of the team would provide a semi-name star from the States to headline, with everyone and everything else coming from Britain. It just goes to show that the more things change, the more they stay the same; replace “B-movie” with “direct-to-DVD” and “Britain” with “Eastern Europe” in the above summary, and you’ve got a pretty good description of what greets you on the new release shelves of your local Hollybuster Video.

Because this was only half a decade after World War II, most of these movies mined the idea of an ex-pat American serviceman who stuck around England for some reason, and Terror Street is no exception. Dan Duryea, familiar American supporting actor who usually played the heavy, here goes for the protagonist’s role as Air Force pilot Bill Rogers, and as the movie opens, he’s in an American plane touching down in England, having smuggled himself into the country for reasons that shall become clear.

It’s like looking into the face of jetlag.

The opening first reel is an example of surprisingly confident visual storytelling, as Bill goes alone from the airbase to his old apartment, whose door label reads “Mr. & Mrs. William Rogers.” The furniture is all draped, and inside the door is a stack of unheeded mail. Almost every envelope is addressed to Kate Rogers, all in the same handwriting, all with American stamps; these are letters he wrote that were never opened. One closet in the bedroom contains his civilian suits; the other is empty, except for a single mismatched shoe. With no one to speak to, Bill silently goes through all of this discovery, accompanied only by the score.

Of course, that can’t last forever. It ends when Bill knocks on the door of the neighbor across the hall, Pam (Marianne Stone), who first swears that she doesn’t know where Katie is, then finally admits that she’s been living in a ritzy West End apartment. He finds the building and coerces the doorman/switchboard operator (Harold Lang), whom he catches listening in on personal calls in the building, to give him the extra key to Katie’s apartment. There is wine in the cupboard, fur coats in the closet, all the signs of a woman who’s forgotten she was ever a wife and lives like a kept woman now. Bill settles into an easy chair to wait for her with a drink in his hand and a gun in his pocket, and…

Oh my. Remember that confident cinematic storytelling only a few minutes ago? Apparently they only had a nickel’s worth, and it’s all spent, because what comes now is a lengthy flashback to their meeting and courtship and such, accompanied by Bill’s first-person narration — the kind of narration that has lines like, “I remember when I first saw you” and “Oh how happy we were.” I’ve got two guesses about this: Either the sequence was originally shot without extraneous narration, and the producers thought the sequence unsuccessful or confusing on its own and ordered the narration as a band-aid; or screenwriter Steve Fisher had an aneurysm between writing that previous dialogue-free sequence and this current mawkish one.

Because all real romance involves penguins.

So we get to see Bill’s first wartime cute-meet with Katie (Elsy Albiin), stills of their courtship (which naturally involves a zoo), the wedding proposal, and the beginnings of wedded bliss in their very own flat. Bill even gave up his flying privileges for a desk job to stay with her. But eventually the cracks show; Bill is offered a chance for a six-month training course stateside — alone — and jumps at it. This doesn’t go over well with the Missus, even though he tries to gloss over it with two lies: that he was ordered to go instead of volunteering, and that it’s only supposed to be a three-month assignment instead of six. Despite that, their first fight becomes their last one for a very long time, and Bill leaves England with their fight as their final words to each other.

The situation gets worse for Bill, as his six-month assignment is extended by three months, and then another three. It takes a full year for him to be able to pull some unofficial strings and get smuggled into England for 36 hours to find out why Katie hasn’t answered any of his letters…

And just as his expository reverie draws to a close, Katie unlocks the door and walks in. But before the can exchange a couple of off-to-a-bad-start sentences, Bill is clubbed over the head by an unseen assailant and misses the rest of the conversation. His attacker is Orville Hart (John Chandos), a porcine fellow of ominous demeanor who wants a mysterious something from Katie; when she doesn’t produce it, he shoots her with Bill’s gun. Then he places the gun back in Bills’ hand, unsuccessfully searches the apartment for whatever it is he wants, then calls the police to tip them off to “trouble” at this address before leaving.

“Hey, this reminds me of the first time I met your mother!”

So Bill comes to himself, he’s lying beside the corpse of his estranged wife with a still-warm gun in his hand and the sound of police sirens coming up the street. (Do British police usually go all lights-and-sirens on the basis of an anonymous tip calmly informing them of “some trouble?”) When the police reach the door, he scurries down the fire escape and over garden walls to elude capture, ending up in the open window of a ground-floor apartment. Very fortunately for him, the tenant is Jenny Miller (Ann Gudrun), the operator of a rescue mission inherited from her father, and just the sort of person to give Bill the benefit of the doubt when the police come searching. She even bandages up his hand where he cut himself climbing her garden wall. And though there are no further obligations discussed right then, you just know that Jenny’s going to end up helping Bill find his wife’s real killer.

Several of the plot elements that should be a major driving force in the rest of the movie don’t seem to have gotten much juice. Bill mentions his 36-hour deadline often in the first half of the movie (so much so that the movie was released as 36 Hours in Britain), but the “ticking clock” element never really causes much tension. And even then, the deadline’s somewhat farcical; after all, he’s being chased for the murder of his wife. If he doesn’t find the real killer and clear his name before his plane is ready to lift off, he might also be discovered to be AWOL! Not that, too!

“Now, if I could only remember which side he’s going to drive on…”

And though he’s being pursued, the police don’t know who he is, or even that the man they’re chasing is American. We keep cutting back to the inspector investigating the murder (Michael Golden), only to watch him slowly figure out that Katie was married… that her husband was American… that he was supposed to be in the States… I think that’s as far as we get before that subplot peters out altogether. Instead, the script throws a few new characters into the mix in the last few minutes (we call that “desperation,” or maybe simply “first draft”); I only mention them because one, Henry Slosson (Kenneth Griffith), seems determined to look like Britain’s answer to Peter Lorre.

Being a short second feature, Terror Street moves along at a fair clip as Bill traces back Katie’s activities since he left London. What’s mostly missing, though, is the emotional element. One could argue that Bill’s devotion to finding his wife’s killer gives him something to focus on so that he doesn’t have to deal with grief just yet, but his demeanor as he goes about it — gruff but civilized — is more like a man investigating a business deal gone wrong, not a guilt-stricken man vowing vengeance on whoever robbed him of his reconciliation. That’s no slight against Duryea, who is the consummate professional in the role; the script simply never gives him a quiet moment of unraveling (something mirroring those silent scenes in the beginning) until after the plot is wrapped up, right before the closing credits, and by then it’s simply too late.

Glass — shattered, like their dreams! (And pebbled, too. Which is not like their dreams.)

Being a product of its time, there are a few noir touches, though more notably in the production design than the plot; there are a shots of wet cobblestoned streets reflecting car headlights, and the final struggle takes place under a swinging ceiling light. But it definitely qualifies as a broad crime-drama more than a true noir, one which one could call “adequate” without meaning it particularly as a putdown.