THE SNIPER reminds me of a more compact, more personal look at a psycho killer than THE NAKED CITY, which it resembles in style and content.

ARTHUR FRANZ gets his big break here, a starring role in a well-written thriller about a serial killer who wishes he could stop killing, if the police would only catch him. The final scene is a summation of that wish, but almost seems like a letdown after all the build-up to what we presume would be a bloody climax (if directed by someone like today's Martin Scorsese).

Franz's trouble is that he looks too much like any clean-cut, normal, handsome young man and his looks work against the grain of the role. He's intense when he has to be, but lacks the intenseness of a James Dean or even a Dane Clark as the man given to sudden outbursts of temper and a psyche that is screaming for help and attention. He's good, but never manages to be better than his material. Think of what someone like DANIEL CRAIG would do with this role today.

MARIE WINDSOR does a nice job as a glamorous night club pianist who has the young man (who works as an errand boy for the local cleaners) as a sort of friend she trusts. Her walk through an almost deserted looking San Francisco at night, down hilly streets on the way to her workplace, is photographed with noir precision and style, as is most of the film. Neat use of San Francisco's hilly environment is a constant point of interest throughout.

ADOLPHE MENJOU is not quite as colorful as Barry Fitzgerald was in THE NAKED CITY, playing a detective determined to catch the serial killer before he strikes again. MABEL PAIGE does a nice job as Franz's landlady who talks to her black and white cat as though it was her own dear child, and GERALD MOHR is briskly efficient as a psychiatrist who thinks the police are going about their search the wrong way.

Wonderfully photographed in B&W shadowy photography, it's a compact and efficient film noir that is perhaps a little too restrained in dealing with frank subject matter but nevertheless gets its points across with chilling clarity, thanks to a tight script and some good suspenseful footage.

Summing up: Stands on its own as a good thriller from the early '50s.

I think I've only seen this twice -- once in its release, when I was a kid, and again on TV, about ten years ago, so my memory of the details are a bit fuzzy. The plot is rudimentary by our standards. A sniper (Arthur Franz) is stalking San Francisco. The police (Adolf Menjou) want to either shoot him or catch him and send him to the gas chamber. The humanist psychiatrist (Richard Kiley) argues that anyone who snipes women who are strangers to him must be mentally ill and the object of his capture should be incarceration and treatment rather than death.

As I said, it's pretty dated, isn't it? Compare it to "Dirty Harry," in which the sniper is nothing more than an evildoer who shoots San Franciscans "because he likes it." The Dirty Harry sniper is protected by an ineffectual judicial system. We root for Harry who simply wants to "shoot the b******." How times have changed. About the time this movie was released, my underaged friends and I used to peek through the windows of a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village. Every third or fourth time we were lined up with our noses against the glass, a police officer would sneak up behind us and go down the row hitting us on top of the head with his baton -- BOP,BOP,BOP... Always the same cop! And without even reading us our rights! That's the attitude of the police in this movie. The cops are practically paleolithic. Nobody's hampered by this business about fair treatment. Kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out! (Please, that's called "sarcasm".)

Menjou is outraged and snappish, Kiley the voice of sweet reason. And Franz, the sniper? Well, it had something to do with his mother. We don't find this out until about half way through the movie when his landlady tells him to be careful with his stove, didn't his mother ever teach him that? Franz stops in mid-stair and grimly announces, "My mother never taught me anything."

The movie is dated in two other ways. I can't tell you how shocking the murder scenes were in 1952. The critics were appalled and some theaters edited out the shootings. But the two or three that are shown on the screen are in long shot and by current standards ludicrously tame.

Here's the other way in which its dated -- the resolution. The police finally identify the sniper, find out which barren room Franz lives in, determine that he's at home, and surround the place with an army of cop cars and tommy-gun agents of the law, every sight trained on the windows of Franz's digs. Franz spots them, assembles and loads his rifle, and waits for them. Menjou, who has by this time begun to see what Kiley has been driving at, calls through a bullhorn for Franz to come out with his hands up. Silence. The cops want to turn the apartment into lace but Menjou demurs. Let's try to talk to him first. A party of them, bristling with guns, sneaks up the stairs and slowly swings open the door to Franz's room expecting him to start shooting. Instead they find Franz sitting in front of the windows, rifle across his lap, catatonic, tears on his face.

Imagine a similar contemporary movie ending with such a dying fall. Would the cops find Franz sitting quietly alone? That's meant to be a rhetorical question. I think we all know what would happen in a modern movie when the police surrounded Franz's apartment. Just follow the numbers. Every window for miles around would be shattered by bullets. The walls would be splattered with blood and brains. The sniper would drag a 40 millimeter cannon out of his closet. San Francisco would be levelled. The actual quiet resolution would generate in modern audiences a vague sense of disappointment. "Talky," the kids would complain between gulps of high-energy soft drinks. "Too slow."

Stanley Kramer, never an articulate man in his own right, turned extraordinarily preachy in his later movies, but this is Kramer during his early period, when he didn't LOOM over his productions quite so much. Splendid use is made of unfamiliar and very ordinary San Francisco locations, by the way. The movie was shot at a time when the city still had a sizable working-class population, now largely disappeared.

Worth seeing, definitely.

This had all the look and feel of film noir as I viewed it but I wasn't certain if it would pass muster as the real deal. It has no femme fatale front and center as most movies of the genre do, but thinking about it, that may be because Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz) killed them all. Marie Windsor came the closest as his victim number one, but she wasn't around long enough to make an impact on the entire story. However the picture does have it's requisite share of pessimism, fatalism and menace, so on that score it delivers in true noir fashion.

I found the cinematographer's work to be quite compelling. The starkly oblique camera angles, be they city streets (amplified by the topography of San Francisco),steep stairways or elevated rooftops, all seem to draw one's attention to and magnify the tormented psyche of the central character. His written plea (see my summary line),dropped anonymously in a city mailbox, reads as a massive cry for help that remains unanswered, except in the verbal exhortation of the police psychiatrist (Richard Kiley) stating his case before a review board. Listening to that argument today however, I don't think it would meet with much approval, in as much as his call for jailing first time sex offenders seems to be given short shrift by liberal judges in the present day.

Actor Franz appeared to have the perfect demeanor for his twisted character, continuously bewildered by the futility of his actions yet powerless to stop his murderous rampage. The film's treatment of his second victim was cleverly handled; all the while we track the woman under Miller's watchful eye, but never see him getting ready to carry out the crime. Then all of a sudden a bullet shatters the woman's apartment window and she falls victim to his single rifle blast. The viewer knows it's coming, but the anticipation is both muted and tension filled, a rare emotion that the film maker expertly achieved.

Going in without knowing anything about the picture, one might be led to believe it's a story about an assassin, and in some respects, the analogy holds. Miller was an assassin of sorts, but his victims were chosen at random for the mere fact of being women. Helpless to overcome his terrifying predilection to murder, Miller is ultimately apprehended with a tear in his eye, not so much for his victims, but for his own remorse at being a monster.