Robert Keys | Through the Shattered Lens

Right now, on Netflix, you can find Emergency Hospital, a low-budget film from 1956. Emergency Hospital, which probably was made to be the second feature on a double bill, covers the course of one night at a hospital. Patients come in. Crimes are investigated. Two doctors — one a man and one a woman and since this film was made in the 50s, that leads to all sorts of confusion — deal with all of the patients. The film manages to stuff a lot of incidents into just 61 minutes of running time.

If you look at the poster above, you’ll see that it implores us to “STOP THE MANIAC! He menaces women in a thrill-crowded city of violent and lust!” I’m not really sure which of the film’s many subplots that is meant to refer to. At one point, the son of a police detective is brought in after crashing his car. He briefly attempts to hold a nurse hostage with a scalpel but, in the end, he doesn’t turn out to be much of a maniac.

In fact, if there’s anything that really distinguishes Emergency Hospital is just how low-key it is. For the most part, the film emphasizes the fact that everyone at the hospital is focused on doing her or his job. The patients all come in with their own individual melodramas but, for the most part, the doctors and the police all react calmly and rationally. It’s interesting to compare Emergency Hospital to something like Magnificent Obsession. Whereas Magnificent Obsession truly embraces the melodrama, Emergency Hospital invites the melodrama to pull up a chair and then tells it to calm down.

Perhaps because it was such a low-budget and obscure film, Emergency Hospital gets away with taking a look at and talking about issues that you normally wouldn’t expect to be so openly explored by a film made in the 50s. And, interestingly enough for a film made in a culturally reserved time, the doctors and nurses at Emergency Hospital take a rather open-minded and nonjudgmental approach to their patients. An anxious mother comes in with her bruised baby and is confronted about being an abusive parent. A teenage girl comes in after being raped and the doctors try to convince her father (who thinks his daughter’s reputation will be ruined) to call the police.

Now, make no mistake about it: Emergency Hospital is not a secret masterpiece. It’s an extremely low-budget movie that looks like an extremely low-budget movie. But, taking all that into consideration, it’s still a lot better than your typical 61 minute second feature.

Emergency Hospital can currently be watched on Netflix.

After watching Inherent Vice last weekend, I decided to get on Netflix and do a search for film noirs. This led to me watching four film noirs from the 50s, all of which were previously unknown to me.

For my first Netflix Noir, I watched a little something called Crime Against Joe. It’s a 69 minute film from 1956. It’s about a guy named Joe. There’s been a crime. Oddly enough, the crime really against Joe. Instead, he’s been wrongly accused of committing a crime against a nightclub singer named Irene. So, perhaps a better title for this film would have been It Sucks To Be Joe.

But anyway —

Crime Against Joe was directed by Lee Sholem. According to Wikipedia, Lee Sholem had a 40 year career as a director. During that time, he directed over 1,300 television episodes and feature films and he finished every single one of them either on time or early. And you can certainly see evidence of that in Crime Against Joe, a film that starts out in a rush and pretty much never slows down until the final fade out.

Joe (John Bromfeld) was voted “most likely to succeed” in high school but — surprise! surprise! — he’s failed to live up to the expectations set for him by the 1945 yearbook. Instead, he enlisted in the army, served in the Korean War, and was diagnosed with “battle fatigue.” (I assume that battle fatigue was the 1950s version of PTSD.) He spent a while in a mental hospital and it was there that he first started painting. When he was released, he moved in with his widowed mother (Frances Morris). While she works to support him, Joe spends his time drinking and painting.

As the movie begins, a drunken Joe has just destroyed his latest painting. (“I can see it in my head but it doesn’t come out on canvas!” Joe shouts, which is actually a pretty good way to describe the dark feeling that all artists occasionally get.) He wanders around town, drunk. He talks to a waitress named Slacks (Julie London), who is obviously in love with him. He gets some sage advice from Red (Henry Calvin), a taxi driver. He stumbles into a nightclub where he harasses a singer (Alika Louis) before finally getting thrown out of the club. In the parking lot, as he stumbles away, a mysterious cowboy (Rhodes Reason) glares at him.

Joe stumbles about until, around two in the morning, he runs into a young woman wearing a nightgown. He tries to talk to her but she only stares at him, her placid face frozen in a zombie-like state. Joe leads her to a nearby house where the woman’s father thanks him for his help and then slams the door in his face.

Later that night, the nightclub singer is found dead on the side of the road. Found near her body is a high school pin that belonged to someone from the class of 1945. Knowing that Joe was drunk that night and had been seen in the nightclub, Detective Hollander (Robert Keys) goes to Joe’s house. Hollander demands to see Joe’s high school pin. Joe says he doesn’t know where it is. Hollander stares at Joe’s paintings. “You always paint half-naked women?” Hollander sneers before arresting Joe for murder.

At the station, Joe says that he was leading the woman back to her house at the same time that the singer was murdered. The woman’s father shows up at the police station. No, he says, Joe was nowhere near his house at two in the morning. Joe is arrested for murder…

Fortunately, Slacks is willing to risk her life to prove that Joe is innocent. And Joe knows that the murderer had to have been someone who he went to high school with…

Crime Against Joe is one of those low-budget, obscure B-movies that actually a lot more interesting than you might think. John Bromfeld does a good job as Joe and the character’s PSTD gives the film a bit more depth than you might otherwise expect. Julie London is great in the role of brave and selfless Slacks (though it’s interesting that this film felt the need to give a masculine nickname to a strong female character) and Rhodes Reason is genuinely menacing as the mysterious cowboy. Crime Against Joe is also full of unexpected and occasionally surreal details. The most obvious example would be the zombie-like woman who Joe runs into on the night of the murder. However, my favorite little oddity is the fact that signs reading “Corey for Councilman” keep popping up in the strangest locations.

(It eventually turns out that Joe went to high school with Corey and the scene where Joe confronts his old classmate is a fun little piece of political satire. That said, there was a part of me that hoped the significance of the sings would just remain an odd and unexplained little detail.)

There’s actually a surprisingly subversive streak running through Crime Against Joe. We usually tend to think of the 50s as being a time when authority figures (like the police) were viewed with blind trust. In Crime Against Joe, however, nobody in power is portrayed positively. The police, for instance, come across like a bunch of close-minded bullies who are prepared to convict Joe based solely on his paintings and his less-than-sterling war record. The scenes where Hollander interrogates Joe are full of menace. In the end, this film is on the side of those living on the margins of respectable society. When Joe and Slacks try to prove Joe’s innocence, they’re also attempting to prove their own right to exist in a society that has rejected both of them.

Crime Against Joe may not be a well-known film but there’s a lot more going on under its surface than you might originally think. It’s on Netflix so check it out when you’ve got 70 minutes to spare.