The Sniper. 1952. USA. Directed by Edward Dmytryk. Screenplay by Harry Brown, based on a story by Edna and Edward Anhalt. With Arthur Franz, Adolphe Menjou, Gerald Mohr, Marie Windsor. 88 min.
Among the first Hollywood films to explore the mind of a serial killer, Edward Dmytryk's noir thriller had a pronounced influence on both Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Vertigo. Everyman Arthur Franz delivers a chilling performance as Eddie Miller, a tormented loner whose unresolved trauma manifests as murderous rage toward women. As Miller stalks San Francisco's hills with his rifle, the film's extraordinary location photography transforms the city's vertiginous landscape into a visual metaphor for his fractured psyche. Adolph Menjou abandons his dapper image to play a rumpled, pre-Columbo police lieutenant, redolently named Frank Kafka; Gerald Mohr is a psychiatrist whose clinical observations reflect producer Stanley Kramer's socially conscious agenda. Marie Windsor appears as one of Miller's potential victims in this unflinching examination of misogyny and mental illness. Dmytryk, recently returned to filmmaking after his blacklisting as one of the Hollywood Ten, directs with a stark, documentary-like precision, offering a sympathetic, if disturbing, portrait of a mind beyond redemption.