A Disappointing Continuation

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Another good film about twins from 1947 – the other being "Dual Alibi" starring Herbert Lom. In this offering, Bonita Granville plays both the good and the bad sister. One of them is murdered and it's up to Inspector Regis Toomey to get to the truth. Ex-soldier Don Castle (Mike) also does some investigating of his own.There is a small cast in this offering and so you may suspect the guilty party at some point. However, this story is clever and does provide you with extra twists and turns at the end. The film is short and basically, it fooled me.Twins always seem to be trouble whenever they pop up in films!

Bonita Granville was a child star who made an indelible impression as the demonic Mary Tilford in "These Three" (1936), she played another memorable meanie in "Maid of Salem" (1937) and then it was back to more conventional roles such as Nancy Drew. During the 40s she strove to find more adult roles and she made some interesting movies - "Youth Runs wild","Hitler's Children", "Suspense". "The Guilty" was one of those films. It was a gritty, tough film noir and being taken from a Cornell Woolrich story had more twists and turns than a mountain road. Olivia De Havilland had played "good twin/bad twin" roles in "The Dark Mirror" a glossy production with Lew Ayres as the baffled doctor, a year or so before."The Guilty" was able to use a similar story but take it in different directions - apart from the mother, everyone else seemed edgy and guilty!!! The plot is a lot tighter and more complicated, it is just an excellent little noir.Mike (Don Castle) shares his flat with an old army buddy, Dixon (Wally Cassell) who because of a head injury sustained during the war, is jumpy, jittery and relies too much on drink and drugs. Both of them are involved with Linda and Estelle, (both played by Bonita Granville) a classic good twin, bad twin mix and when Dixon realises that it is sweet Linda who he loves, Mike takes up with Estelle, a boy crazy party girl.One night Linda disappears and later turns up murdered - enter Police Inspector Heller (Regis Toomey) a very cool, calm and collected type who is like a dog with a bone. He encounters a baffling maze of false clues and Mike also starts his own investigation because he feels Dixon is being judged without defense. Not only has Estelle become Linda's protector (before her death they had hated each other - now she is determined to find the killer) but fatherly lodger (John Litel, who played Nancy Drew's father) seems to be a bit too fond of the twins. There is a scene at the start where he eagerly looks forward to going to the movies with Linda, only to be let down.The film is set mostly in the men's apartment (it is based on a Woolrich short story "Two Fellows in a Furnished Room") and a cheap bar, obviously Monogram had a tight budget but it just heightened the claustrophobic and seedy atmosphere that gripped you till the end. Something of interest - it was the first picture produced by John Devereaux Wrather Jnr., a Dallas oil millionaire and before the movie's premiere he and Bonita were wed.Highly, Highly Recommended.

Bonita Granville was an extremely talented younger actress, as was clear from 'The Beloved Brat' (1938) and the four Nancy Drew films she made, for instance. She had a special charm and directness which was most refreshing. Here she is, somewhat older, playing identical twins in an extremely low-budget noir thriller produced by her husband Jack Wrather. The sets are so cheap, it seems as if a puff of wind would blow them down, and they are bleak as well, perhaps on purpose to make the atmosphere one of desolation. She is certainly cast against type, since the main twin whom she plays is a bad girl, and Bonita was famous for being a sweetie pie. However, it works, and she proves she can be as sultry and venomous as any gal if she wants to, and she does want to. The two guys are Don Castle and Wally Cassell, which reminds me that Louis Ferdinand-Celine wrote a novel the English title of which is 'Castle to Castle', not bad for this situation, if we change it to 'Cassell to Castle', as one twin passes between the two guys. This is a very powerful and effective noir story with its twists and grisly side. As it is 1947, there is a guy suffering from serious shell-shock, holding his face in his hands and saying: 'I'm going to crack up completely again, like I did the first time'. There are desperate undercurrents of insane jealousy and passion, a disappearance and murder, seething resentments and kisses that are more like football touchdowns, they are so rough. For something made for ten dollars, this is a really good thriller. The voice-over narrative works extremely well, and the whole thing is a knockout if you can forgive the fact that somebody along the way forgot about the need for production values. Anyway, there's Bonita, and you even get two for the price of one.

In 1946, Olivia De Havilland donned monogram brooches and identity necklaces to take the dual role of good and bad twins Ruth and Terry in Robert Siodmak's The Dark Mirror. The following year Bonita Granville followed suit, as good and bad twins Linda and Estelle, in Monogram's sub-basement adaptation of a Cornell Woolrich story. Of the two, The Guilty is the creepier, more haunting movie, taking a place of dubious honor amid the nether reaches of film noir.Mustachioed Don Castle shares his walk-up flat with his superior from army days, Wally Cassel, who's a little unstable owing to a head injury sustained in combat. They're involved in a complicated foursome with the twins; when one of the fellows breaks up with one of the girls, the other takes up with the ditched sister. But the insanely jealous Estelle keeps playing one guy off the other; she wants both and her sister to have neither. One night Linda disappears; later her body is found on a rooftop, in a barrel of gravel (she was too big to shove down the incinerator shaft). Police investigator Regis Toomey encounters a baffling maze of alibis and false clues (Castle is on the hunt as well), until the movie ends with climaxes within climaxes.All this takes place in but three sleazy sets: The men's apartment; that of the twins, their mother and a long-time boarder (John Litel); and a corner bar from which most of the story is narrated in flashback. A few forays into the dark, deserted streets only enhance the claustrophobia, the obsessiveness of Woolrich's nightmare vision. (And his obsessive fiction reuses the same themes and gambits over and over; there are parallels here to the same year's The Fall Guy, which resembles The Black Angel, which...).Granville, of course, will ever be the screen embodiment of Nancy Drew, from the four programmers she starred in as the teenaged sleuth during the late '30s. Her career started to sputter in the next decade; for one thing her girlish exuberance didn't blossom into womanly glamor. But she developed a tough, no-nonsense, very-'40s face (not unlike Ann Savage's). Her noir appearances were limited to a small (but meaty) role in The Glass Key and a leading one in the low-budget Suspense. It's a shame, because grew up into quite a good bad girl.