This is a very strange and refreshingly offbeat film noir made on a shoestring. It features Arlene Martel (then called Arline Sax) playing two sisters, named Ellen and Ruth. Although she had been appearing in TV series for six years before this film was made, this was her first feature film. She manages to create two bizarre and fascinating characters. The film is not made in a conventional manner. The two policemen investigating the murder do not have the usual cop-mates relationship, and are quirky, with bizarre outbursts and lengthy reflective pauses and silences. The dialogue is fresh. The film avoids being a standard cop drama and has some unusual psychological aspects. Elisha Cook Jr. Plays the girls' authoritarian father, and there appears to be something sinister about what he may have done to the girls when young to make them the way they are. John Hoyt plays the thoughtful older detective, who is always stopping to ponder things, and the tempestuous younger detective who falls for the girl Ellen is played by Bob Kelijan. He is always over-reacting, and I might say also sometimes over-acting as well. At one point in the film all the moving action stops and we have a sequence of dramatic stills, evidently taken from the action. I don't know whether this is a device of the director or whether they lost some cans of film or what. It seems clear that those scenes were indeed filmed, and so we must suppose that the director substituted the stills for emotional effect. Or maybe he was ordered to cut the film down, and rather than lose a chunk of the story, he showed it in abbreviated form as stills to save five minutes of time. I presume we will never know the answer to that. Anyway, it works despite the unexpected nature of it. The director was Antonio Santean, and he and John Hoyt wrote the script. It was the only feature film Santean ever directed, though he later wrote three others. He was born in Argentina in 1936, and died in 2014. There must be a story there somewhere, but we will probably never know that either. Much of the cinematography is unusual and experimental. The film features several characters who are psychologically disturbed, and one outrageous example is a mad artist played by King Moody who smashes up his studio when upset. You might say the entire film was psychologically disturbed, but in a nice way. It is well worth seeing for those interested in unusual variations of film noir and early independent American cinema.
Review of The Glass Cage
