Experiment in Terror (1962, Blake Edwards) (Patreon)

60/100

Seems as if the experiment here involved creating a procedural thriller that never delves even a single Planck length below its surface. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and certainly the film wastes no time before introducing terror; it's an exciting structural oddity that Kelly's physical peril peaks in the opening scene, which would be almost any other movie's harrowing finale. We don't yet have the vaguest clue who this woman is, but suddenly she's unnerved by labored breathing (kinda wonder if Lucas was thinking of Red Lynch when he conceived Darth Vader) emanating from the darkness of her garage, then attacked, then attacked again after she sensibly ignores his warning and calls the police. When you kick off in such high gear with your protagonist (as opposed to, say, Drew Barrymore's Scream victim), there's a danger of having nowhere to go, which Edwards deftly avoids by orchestrating visually dynamic setpieces at regular intervals. Or, I dunno, maybe "The Gordons" (as they're credited onscreen; briefly wondered whether it might be Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, unlikely though that seemed) wrote "INT.—STUDIO FULL OF CREEPY MANNEQUINS—NIGHT" in their screenplay, and deserve much of the credit. In any case, one's attention remains firmly gripped all the way through Experiment's climactic, very effective slow-speed chase through the mass of people exiting Candlestick Park following a ball game, with both pursuers and  pursued barely able to move. Gratifying interest, too, in how detectives handle such tricky situations as talking to a crime victim who's clearly under duress.

So why did I still wind up feeling somewhat dissatisfied? All-plot-all-the-time just doesn't grab me the way it once did, and this film has virtually nothing going on in terms of either character or theme—it's as perfectly flat a genre picture as I can recall. "We don't yet have the vaguest clue who this woman is," I noted above, speaking of the film's opening minutes...but two hours later, we still don't really know who Kelly is, other than Person Being Semi-Randomly Threatened. ("Semi" only because it has to be a bank employee.) Nobody onscreen has any discernible existence beyond the narrative's needs at that moment. Consequently, the performances, excepting Ross Martin's asthmatic villain, are almost anti-vivid, with Glenn Ford in particular coming across like Glenn Bored. If one's feeling generous, adjectives like "efficient" and "ruthless" are available, and not inaccurate, but I couldn't shake a sense of fundamental emptiness that something like, say, Tourneur's Nightfall (to pick a plot-heavy crime drama from roughly the same era) manages to avoid. Is there literally nobody in Kelly's life apart from a younger sister who functions purely as a secondary target? Couldn't Ford's detective exhibit some kind of personality? (I hated Prisoners, but Gyllenhaal demonstrated how one can make "dogged professional" oddly compelling.) Even Red Lynch gets diminished, becoming less scary as the movie goes along—by the end, he's just a small-timer with a very dumb plan that never had much chance of success, but there's little poignance in that. I was never anything but happy to be watching Experiment in Terror, and I doubt that I'll ever think of it again, except in passing. That title deserved something more singular.