Private Hell 36

Private Hell 36 is a 1954 crime film noir directed by Don Siegel starring Ida Lupino, Steve Cochran, Howard Duff, Dean Jagger and Dorothy Malone.[1]

Private Hell 36
Theatrical release poster
Directed byDon Siegel
Produced byCollier Young
Screenplay byCollier Young
Ida Lupino
StarringIda Lupino
Steve Cochran
Howard Duff
Dean Jagger
Dorothy Malone
Music byLeith Stevens
CinematographyBurnett Guffey
Edited byStanford Tischler
Production
company
The Filmakers
Distributed byFilmakers Releasing Organization
Release date
  • September 3, 1954 (1954-09-03) (United States)
Running time
81 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

The picture was one of the last feature-length efforts by Filmakers, a company created by producer Collier Young and his star and then-wife Ida Lupino.

Plot

L.A. police detectives Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran), a rogue cop, and Jack Farnham (Howard Duff), his family-man partner, get in over their heads when they decide to split up thousands of dollars they found on a recently killed counterfeiter. To make matters worse, they are assigned by their police captain to look for the missing cash.

Things get even worse when a blackmailer enters the picture and one cop gets romantically involved with Lili Marlowe (Ida Lupino), a money-hungry nightclub singer, who fingered the hot money-passer at the racetrack. Farnham decides to turn honest and hand the money over to his superiors, but the other cop decides to take it all.

Cast

Background

The extensive racetrack scenes in the film were shot at Hollywood Park Racetrack in Inglewood, California. The interiors of real bars and shops were used so the actors could walk out into actual streets within the same scene.

The film starts with a pre-credit sequence before the first titles appear in an early modernist foreshadowing of the action teaser before it became commonplace on television series of the sixties. Typical of The Film[m]akers productions the last title card misspells “Made in Holl[y]wood, USA.“ Notable also as one of the early Siegel B movies on which future auteur Sam Peckinpah (credited under his first name of David) learned his craft as a dialogue director.

Reception

Film critic Bosley Crowther wrote a tepid review, "A critic might note that attention is sharply divided between the main theme and the incidental character that Miss Lupino plays. This is somewhat understandable, since Miss Lupino happens to be one of the partners in Filmakers and a coauthor of the script. But let's not worry about it. No deplorable damage is done. There's not very much here to damage. Just an average melodrama about cops."[2]

References
  1. Private Hell 36 at the American Film Institute Catalog.
  2. Crowther, Bosley. The New York Times, film review, "Private Hell 36,' a Story of Policemen, Has Premiere at the Paramount", September 4, 1954. Accessed: June 23, 2013.
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