The Guilty

From 1947, "The Guilty" is a film noir starring Bonita Granville, Don Castle, Regis Toomey, John Litel, and Wally Cassell.

This is strictly poverty row, Monogram. Bonita Granville plays twins, Linda and Estelle. One is sweet and the other is a vamp. I had a hard time figuring out who was who.

Castle and Cassell play roommates Mike and Johnny. Johnny is the nervous type. When the sweet twin is killed, Johnny is sure he will be blamed and makes himself seem guilty by acting like such a wreck.

This movie is dry as a bone. Castle is one of those stereotypical B movie tough guys who talks out of one side of his mouth. Granville was always a good actress, but the twins' characters aren't well fleshed-out and I'm sure she had no time to work on differences between them. By the way, her husband, Jack Wrather, produced this, and if you're a baby boomer, you know that Bonita Granville Wrather produced the Lassie series.

Regis Toomey plays the detective, and he's pretty one note. He and Castle sounded like they were imitating hard-boiled detectives.

What bothered me is that we knew before we even saw Estelle and Linda that the two were identical twins. So Estelle keeping her back to Linda while she was talking to her in the beginning was a big waste of time.

When she walks out to face her sister, she does it in a grand way, like the audience should be surprised that she looks like Linda. The Castle narration mentions TWICE that they're lookalikes beforehand. Not very well done.