- Feeling like a cross between He Walked by Night and Dial 1119, Edward Dmytryk's The Sniper focuses on a lone gunman named Eddie Miller (Arthur Franz), who terrorizes San Francisco by shooting women seemingly at random. Although the audience gets to see that Eddie knew his first victim (Marie Windsor) through his job as a cleaner and had met his second victim (Marlo Dwyer) at a bar, the police (Adolphe Menjou, Gerald Mohr, Frank Faylen) have essentially nothing to go on. As they round up every known sex offender in the city, the police psychologist (Richard Kiley) warns them that they have to find a way to narrow their search.
- From its opening warning about the dangers of sex crimes to a mid-film speech decrying inadequate laws to deal with such matters, The Sniper comes across as an advocacy piece for improved mental health evaluations of criminals. This was, and still is, a very important issue, but the film is probably more convincing as a warning about such criminals than as a path to improved legislation. Franz does a good job conveying Willie's struggles with insanity, and the scenes depicting his first two murders are appropriately chilling. The hilly streets of San Francisco make for a memorable backdrop, too. Given that the film came out nearly seventy years ago, I'm sure that American society must have solved the problems of widespread mental health problems and easy access to guns in the ensuing decades, but I'll be sure to check on that once I'm done with this review.
- Apparently Dmytryk was forced to hire Adolphe Menjou, despite the latter's role in the HUAC hearings.
- The film also features Wally Cox, aka Mister Peepers.
