The Cry Baby Killer (1958)

Director: Justus Addiss
Writer: Leo Gordon and Melvin Lavy
Stars: Harry Lauter, Jack Nicholson and Carolyn Mitchell

Index: The First Thirty.

Yes, Jack Nicholson, star of so many eighties and nineties movies, started out way back in the fifties, when he was shockingly young but still recognisable. His name surely eclipses all the others above today but he was very much a new kid in 1958 working on his first picture.

The biggest name other than Nicholson’s to our eyes today is that of the producer, Roger Corman, for whom Nicholson worked in many of his early films, not only as an actor but as whatever a film needed at any particular time. If you know Corman’s name, then it shouldn’t surprise you to find that this is an exploitation film, but it doesn’t do a bad job at mimicking the effects of Ace in the Hole on a tiny budget.

Other than the opening scene, which is set in a dark alley, the whole picture unfolds in or around Pete Gambelli’s café. There are a lot of characters, meaning that a lot of actors get to have moments in the spotlight. Nicholson gets surprisingly little to do, but he’s arguably the lead character, even with second billing after Harry Lauter, and his character is absolutely the driving force of the entire picture.

He’s Jimmy Wallace, who is as close to the Cry Baby Killer of the title as anyone gets, but he’s also the good guy, at least kinda sorta. His nemesis, Manny Cole, is clearly the bad guy, a wannabe gangster kid who only fights Jimmy in that alley with the aid of henchmen to hold his opponent’s arms. Then again, the script is very keen to ask questions about who’s a good guy and who’s a bad guy. It’s never as clear as we might expect it to be.

The fight is about Carole Fields, who used to be a good girl, Jimmy’s girl, but has turned to the dark side and is now all over Manny, even if she clearly doesn’t like a lot of what he does, not least the fact that he keeps on spiking her coffee given that her parents are away.

Jimmy has the balls to come into Gambelli’s and call Manny out, but he isn’t bright enough to do it well, so he’s about to get jumped again by henchmen sporting brass knuckles when he grabs a gun from Al’s waist and opens fire.

Horrified by the belief that he’s a murderer all of a sudden (he isn’t), he runs back towards the café and stumbles into a standoff with a customer, Officer Gannon. Next thing, he’s in a storeroom holding three people hostage, two of them a mother and her baby.

Really, this is where the film begins, because this isn’t your typical hostage drama. It’s 1958 so there are no hostage negotiators, just a cop, Lt. Porter, doing his best. Jimmy doesn’t have any demands, the only request he has being to bring the baby some milk. And he has no plan. He’s completely lost and stumbling mentally in the attempt to conjure up a way out.

Meanwhile, the real story is unfolding back at Gambelli’s, where the cops ask questions of the key players, the media sensationalise what may or may not be happening and everyone in the vicinity has their own opinion to raise.

This is less about Jimmy, who would usually be the man with the power in a situation like this, and more about the community that’s let things deteoriate to the point that something like this happens.

Lt. Porter, played by character actor Harry Lauter, is the authority figure, and he’s a sharp cookie. However, he plays certain scenes very tough indeed, threatening violence, even to a punk kid like Joey, the idiot laughing hyena of Manny’s posse, played to gloriously annoying effect by Ralph Reed.

Pete Gambelli has Jimmy and Manny take it outside, but he doesn’t care about them, only that whatever they do doesn’t affect his place. We soon learn that he sells booze to underage kids like Joey, so he can give it to Manny to slip into Carole’s coffee. He’s played sleazily by Frank Richards.

Rick Connor of KQQQ doesn’t help anything, but we learn a lot of his journalistic tricks like using binoculars to watch the cops talk to each other with chalk and slate or spinning a story to the maximum dramatic effect. Ed had five hundred plus episodes of Peyton Place to come.

We learn something of where Al got stupid from after his father shows up drunk to shoot Jimmy through the window, in front of a host of cops. He obviously isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed and Al followed in his footsteps.

My favourite character for the longest time was Julie, a waitress at Gambelli’s, even if Lynn Cartwright was the writer’s wife, but she gets a little judgemental later in the film, albeit in very believable manner.

That writer, by the way, is Leo Gordon, who also shows up in the crowd, most of whom are only hanging around in hope that something sensational happens. They think about being a mob at points but never quite get there, even with recognisable faces like Gordon and Bruno VeSota spurting out inflammatory comments.

My favourite scene is appropriately driven by character dynamics. Jimmy’s parents show up and Carl Maxton blames them immediately. He’s both husband and father to hostages and he’s understandably emotional. Mrs. Wallace, however, blames Carole Fields, the girl at the heart of the original dispute, and she reacts to the idea. It’s here that they all realise that it’s not really anyone’s fault and they’re all stuck in the same mess as each other.

By the end of the film, I think my favourite character had become Sam, initially a worker in the storeroom and soon a hostage. He’s the epitome of calm, even in these circumstances, and he may well be the only character from an ensemble cast who doesn’t do anything that’s remotely negative at any point. If the film has a good guy, it’s Sam.

What was most notable to me, given that it’s 1958, is the fact that Jordan ‘Smoki’ Whitfield is a black actor, but, menial job aside, nobody in the film either mentions that he’s black or treats him in a different way because of it. I’m not sure that Corman had any intention here of making a social comment but he made one nonetheless. It’s highly refreshing to see a film from the fifties do something that progressive.

But how did Nicholson do on his debut? He did pretty well, all things considered. While a lot of moments can be called out in this film, it has to be said that few of them involve Jimmy, who’s inactive far more than he’s active, even as the glue to the story. He sits there trying to figure out what to do while everyone else does their thing around him.

Given that inherent restriction, he does well and I’m interested to see how much he grew a couple of years later in Too Soon to Love.