Guilty Bystander (1950)

It seems like most of the reviews on Letterboxd and other places say that Guilty Bystander is middling or disappointing. I feel precisely the opposite about Joseph Lerner's weird little film noir. In fact, it fairly blew me away. I don't think I've seen a noir quite this seedy before. The only thing I can compare it to for nihilism is Blast of Silence and that's from 1961 not 1950. The flophouses, the warehouses, and the bars in this are frankly disgusting. Even the bannisters are covered in some kind of muck, as we learn in one of the film's first moments; in Guilty Bystander cigarettes fall lazily from characters' mouths onto floors, and no one even stubs them out. This film is set in the underbelly of underbellies. There's an extraordinary fight sequence in which our anti-hero has to wrestle a guy with one arm because he's been shot. It's bracingly realistic, almost tedious. Guilty Bystander is no studio picture.

The acting is not great, however. J. Edward Bromberg gives a kind of low-rent Peter Lorre that works fine, but Faye Emerson is quite boring (one never truly believes she might be part of a double cross), and Mary Boland should really be a lot better than she is. But Kay Medford does excellent work here, and Sam Levene and Harry Landers are great in their smaller parts. Zachary Scott... well I don't think I've decided how I feel about him yet, mostly because I hate his mustache, but I think he might be good in this.

Guilty Bystander was restored from a print—apparently no negative exists anymore—through funding from Nicolas Winding Refn. I'm so glad it was. This is B-movie gold, and I found it to be a compelling portrait of New York petty crime. I don't think I've seen anything quite like it.