The Threat, 1949, is a terrific brisk (66 minutes) crime film from director Felix Feist. Although it has some trappings of a film noir it lacks the essential ingredients of alienation and existential obsession of the true film noir (yes, I am a splitter, not a lumper) and it has a somewhat happy/sappy ending that one associates more with its B film status than with a film noir. Charles McGraw plays an escaped convict who kidnaps the district attorney, detective and woman whom he blames for sending him to jail. He does not kill them because as a psychotic he enjoys their suffering and tortures them for information. Feist works closely with cinematographer Harry J. Wild to portray the world of the psychotic criminal and those he kidnaps by using disorienting low and tilted camera angles.
This is one of McGraw's first leading roles, after effective supporting roles in films such as The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946), where he plays an amoral hitman with partner William Conrad. Feist uses the ingenious idea of a car hidden in a moving van: once the cops start after the van after McGraw shoots a cop at a gas station his gang drives the car out of the van and leaves the van behind. When McGraw, his two partners, his former lover, the district attorney and detective, and the original driver of the van get to a desert hideout to wait for a partner in crime the squabbling and betrayals start, as the heat weakens everyone.
Feist was a superb director of B genre films from 1933 to 1953 (when he turned to television), including the impressive film noir The Man Who Cheated Himself, 1950 (see my post of July 1, 2018).
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