A Killer Walks

Director Ronald Drake has a single film credit to his name: this dreamy, dreary psychological noir, A Killer Walks, which feels like a strange amalgam of Arthur Ripley’s Voice in the Wind (1944), John Kruse’s October Moth (1960), and even F.W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927). With a minimal runtime (and budget), and shot mostly at night, the film stars Laurence Harvey as handsome, orphaned Ned Harsten who slowly reveals his psychotic tendencies as he plots to get rid of grandmother Elizabeth (Ethel Edwards) and little brother Frankie (Trader Faulkner) so he can take sole ownership of the family farm. Susan Shaw plays big city girl Joan Gray who won’t give Ned the time of day unless he secures sufficient assets to fund her lifestyle, and Laurence Naismith plays Doctor James, the grandmother’s trusted physician and friend who may be the only one to forestall tragedy. It’s a sad household, the elder characters behaving as if from a different era, which befits Spear’s strings-dominant score, sometimes lively but more often mournful, as if a quartet of violins is whispering from the next room. With the majority of sequences unfolding in the darkened farmhouse, Drake employs low-key lighting as if it were the main character. Special recognition goes to Harvey who, in one of his earliest film roles, steps effortlessly into the mind of a charming madman.