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Supelice Dreadfully Boring

Mischa Redfern I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Keira Brennan The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

mark.waltz Willing to give up everything for a sexy babe who isn't bad but yet drives him crazy, a tired and disillusioned cop (Edmund O'Brien) turns to murder in order to get out of a business he has grown to hate. When first seen, O'Brien has his arm tightly around a man he is guiding into an alley. A bullet goes off, an obvious blind man witnesses the killing, and a crowd forms, where O'Brien insists that he was trying to frighten the victim to stop with a bullet that went wild and hit its victim. O'Brien has conveniently removed a bag of money from the dead man's vest pocket which he does not turn over, and returns to his duty as normal. But there's another side to this crooked cop, and we see that when he visits scantily clad Marla English who is about to go from full dressed clerk to teddy wearing cigarette girl. O'Brien goes ballistic on seeing his girl dressed like this, manhandles her and orders her to leave immediately. Fellow cop John Agar suspects that something's amiss, and when the deaf man from the apartment above the murder alley suddenly turns up dead, there's an alleyway waiting for O'Brien one that will lead him to his doom.This crafty film noir is seen through the eyes of a bad guy, one who's supposed to be on the right side of the law, but disillusionment with law enforcement has pretty much destroyed. O'Brien is excellent as this multi faceted character who finds himself dealing not only with organized crime figures but old colleagues who obviously trusted him at one point. He has a horrifying sequence that is nearly as chilling as the pushing of the little old lady in the wheelchair down the stairs in "Kiss of Death". The whole film is set up like a time bomb ticking, just waiting for him to either explode himself or even accidentally step on one. The final reel is a chase sequence between O'Brien and both seedy criminals and his former co-workers, going from a busy community swimming pool to a housing community under construction. Everything about this film noir is top notch, tensely paced and quite the nail biter. Look for a bleached blonde Carolyn Jones as a party girl whom O'Brien meets in a dive bar.

RanchoTuVu The poor police detectives that populated the film noirs of the early 1950s. Their suits were rumpled and they lived on whatever pittance the departments paid them. Edmond O'Brien pretty much owns the stereotype in Shield For Murder, which he also co-directed, a film that takes "hard-hitting" to new heights of violence, most notably in a scene where he pistol-whips the holy crap out Claude Aikens, who plays an enforcer for the local underground crime boss. O'Brien's character had either gradually gotten fed up with his lousy pay or was always on the take, but either way, his murder of a numbers runner and "liberation" of the $25,000 he was carrying, opens this film onto a unique level of tawdry bleakness only made possible by the lesser studios, like the one from which this highly recommended film emerged. Ostensibly, what drives O'Brien's character is a desire to provide the kind of life his girlfriend (Marla English) deserves, a nicely appointed and totally furnished tract house in the suburbs. John Agar, O'Brien's honest partner on the detective division, seems to gradually move in on Marla, coinciding with O'Brien's descent into violent desperation, capped off by a few drinks in a spaghetti bar where he meets incredible looking Carolyn Jones. Everything builds up, well-paced to the end.

blanche-2 Edmond O'Brien has a "Shield for Murder" in this 1954 noir also starring Marla English, John Agar, and Carolyn Jones. O'Brien plays a bad cop - one review here said he was a good cop who gave into temptation. Not so. He was a bad cop, who had been suspected of trouble in the past but never caught.In the beginning of the film, Barney (O'Brien), a detective, kills a bookie and steals the $25,000 that the victim is carrying. He claims that he killed in self defense, and his story is accepted. Then the fact that the bookie was carrying money, now missing, emerges. What Barney doesn't know at first is that there is a witness, a deaf and dumb man, who saw the whole thing.Barney is a person of great interest to the bookie's boss, and also, a young man he helped bring up in the force (John Agar), his staunchist defender against criticism, is anxious to clear him. Barney, meanwhile, wants to purchase a dream house for him and his girlfriend (English) and get married. When he finds out about the witness, he needs to do some fast work.O'Brien gives a very hard-edged performance. His character is completely unlikable. The very pretty Marla English unfortunately was unable to act. In one scene, however, Barney goes into a bar and meets a platinum blonde, who turns out to be actress Carolyn Jones, normally known for her stylish short black haircut.Pretty brutal for the '50s. O'Brien elevates the material. Interesting noir, co-directed by Howard Koch and O'Brien.

calvinnme This film has great atmosphere and starts out with promise, but it bogs down pretty quickly. For one, Edmund O'Brien is playing a man who has been a police detective for 16 years yet he kills a guy in cold blood in an alley with apparently two apartment complexes full of windows looking down on what he is doing. Also, the 25K that the detective steals from the man he kills was slated to go to a very violent gangster who has an accurate account of the comings and goings of the dead man. O'Brien owns up to the shooting itself but tells internal affairs that his gun misfired on a fleeing perp, so now the gangster knows exactly who to point the finger at. Plus the detective is known as a marksman and crack shot. All in all, Leslie Nielson's Frank Drebbin couldn't have done a worse job.The detective is willing to kill to get this 25K so he can buy a rather modest tract house and live the middle class dream with his barroom cigarette-girl girlfriend as his wife. He just wants to live like a normal guy and get out of the "muck" of the criminal element even though his act has turned him into that criminal element.The rest of the film is spent trying to show how the detective went bad, and the conflicted feelings of the man doing the internal police investigation on the shooting. The investigator happens to be someone who, as a kid, O'Brien's character rescued from a life of crime.It's a pretty good character study and crime drama with some interesting twists and turns, but it's definitely not a ground-breaking noir.