WALK THE DARK STREET

US, 1956, 73 minutes, Black-and-white.
Chuck Connors, Don Ross, Regina Gleason, Vonne Godfrey, Eddie Kasafian, Wyott Ordung.
Directed by Wyott Ordung.

This is a small budget supporting feature. It was written and directed by Wyott Ordung, who wrote and directed a number of small films. It features Chuck Connors at the beginning of his career.

The film opens with a man walking down a dark Los Angeles street, carrying a rifle in a container, hearing a tyre burst and falling to the ground. The film then goes into flashback, a sequence during the Korean War, the falling man the lieutenant and his friend now critical of him, writing a letter to his brother that if he should die, the lieutenant was to blame. He rushes over the top and is killed.

On return, the lieutenant goes to see the brother, played by Chuck Connors. He is a hunter and has many trophies. However, he also has a bad heart. He was possessive of his brother and now proposes a variation on The Most Dangerous Game, the two of them with rifles, camera rifles rather than bullets, should hunt each other through the city for 48 hours, the lieutenant getting $10,000 for his sporting business if he wins.

There are various scenes of stalking – and amazement now that people could carry rifles in plain sight through the streets of Los Angeles, though the brother is picked up by the police and interrogated. The lieutenant goes to a nightclub, picks up a girl who is ready for him, the dead man’s girlfriend who is against the older brother who was forbidding his brother to marry her. There is also a scene between the brother and his girlfriend.

With various warnings, the stalking begins again, a final confrontation, the brother collapsing, the revelation that each of the guns had a bullet rather than a camera.

An interesting idea – but executed very much in the style of the poverty row supporting features.