The System

Widely panned upon its release, Lewis Seiler’s The System is an odd kind of noir: more drama than crime, more talk than action, more daylight than darkness, and an uneven pace, often slow and almost anticlimactic. Yet, the film still manages to engage the senses from start to finish, Lovejoy’s typically understated performance a kind of cipher for the viewer’s reactions to the morally ambivalent behavior on screen. Lovejoy portrays John Merrick (no, not the Elephant Man), a seemingly upstanding businessman in the town of Clarkton who secretly runs a nationwide gambling syndicate. When a teen-ager in town is shot dead while desperately robbing a jewelry store to pay back a bookie, it sets off a chain of events spanning a newspaper exposé (in fact, the first ten minutes lead us to believe a reporter will be the lead protagonist), rumors and resentments, more murders, a tragic suicide, and a state Senate investigation at which Merrick and his associates are compelled to testify. Part noir, part gangster film, part courtroom drama, part family melodrama, Eisinger’s script takes risks with the plot, the emotional climax when Merrick begins to sob alone at night in his empty office, encaged on all sides by the sliced light from Venetian blinds. The oversized Bruno VeSota plays a ruthless, despicable gangster from out of town, Paul Picerni plays the handsome, charming chief counsel for the committee, and Joan Weldon is unfortunately nonessential as Merrick’s love interest, Felice Stuart, who happens to be the daughter of the local newspaper publisher (Fay Roope). The cast highlight, however, just might be Frank Richards as Charley, Merrick’s big lug of a butler whose protectiveness can only stretch so far before he collapses into a pile of weeping mush.