Private Hell 36

Don Siegel’s Private Hell 36 is a small, patient, modestly budgeted film that makes up for any lack of stylistic pizzaz and visceral thrills with expertly crafted characters and mounting tension. Co-written by soon-to-become-famous director Sam Peckinpah, whose earliest film credits were as a dialogue coach on Don Siegel works like this one, the film opens with a robbery in New York followed by a gunfight in an empty Los Angeles department store before settling into a story of two police officers – the single, carefree Cal Bruner (Steve Cochran) and family man Jack Farnham (Howard Duff) — who, having run a criminal off the road and over a cliff, discover not only his corpse in the wreckage but also several hundred thousand dollars. This is when the moral gulf between the partners rears its head: pressured — even manipulated — by Bruner, the men steal a portion of the cash before reporting the accident back to Captain Michaels (Dean Jagger), who fairly quickly suspects that his boys are hiding something, especially as he notices a growing discomfort in Farnham’s normally easygoing personality. Noir fixture Ida Lupino, whose own production company financed the film, plays nightclub singer Lilli Marlowe, a sort of accidental femme fatale whose desire for a wealthy husband was the lovelorn Bruner’s incentive to get rich quick. (Dorothy Malone plays Farnham’s wife.) While the film is no masterpiece, Siegel and company keep viewers fully engaged in the story through a solid script and master craftsmanship of pivotal scenes, for example, the sequence in which the cops explore the accident scene and discover the money without uttering a word, or the subtle way Lilli finally informs Bruner that she knows how he suddenly came into money (“Did Jack’s rich uncle die tonight too?”).