Review and Comment (first post on site)

I was led to buy and watch Two-Dollar Bettor following discussions on the message boards for Killers From Space about that film's sexy leading lady, Barbara Bestor. Two-Dollar Bettor, made three years earlier, is one of Miss Bestor's few other films and for various reasons this looked like the best bet (as it were) to get another look at her. More about BB later.

This movie's tag line is, "I Bet! I Stole! I Killed!", and that pretty much sums up the plot developments here. In brief: John Hewitt (John Litel) visits the track one day and gets caught up in racing fever. After a few easy wins he starts down the inevitable losing streak and resorts to cashing in his war bonds, emptying his savings, and finally, of course, stealing, in order to pay off his bookie and then to repay all the cash he's stolen. The fact that John works in the local bank and has access to the safe marked "Controller's Fund" makes this aspect easy to accomplish. Early on he meets Mary Slate (Marie Windsor), who collects money for John's bookie and who pretends to befriend John. (Just to prove that men are suckers whose brains are in their pants, the widowed Hewitt, who's around 60 and looks 70, really thinks this gorgeous, sultry 30-year-old is nuts about him.) Late in the picture Mary's ex shows up (apparently out of prison), and they plot to lure John into betting $20,000 on a "sure-fire" race. Naturally, they try instead to abscond with the dough. I won't go into further detail but suffice to say that the third part of the film's slogan is realized. But there's a sort-of happy ending to it all, although John has to pay for his sins -- big-time.

Two-Dollar Bettor is pretty much what you might expect, but for all that isn't a bad film, albeit cheaply made. It moves along at a fast clip, and I found myself caught up in the guy's plight. He's an idiot, but you still feel sorry for him, especially as he's otherwise a nice man, good father, model citizen and about to get a big promotion. The sequence where he flies to New Orleans to bet $1000 on a race (because his bookie will only cover him for $1000 and he needs to bet $2Gs to get even) is surprisingly riveting: watching Hewitt go through the ups and downs of betting, enduring the heart-stopping moments of the race, then coping with its twisted aftermath, is genuinely gripping and nerve-wracking for the viewer, and Litel is especially excellent here. (This is the scene where the DVD's somewhat overwrought cover art comes from.) The ending is both satisfying to the audience and imparts the requisite abject lesson amidst its basically happy finale, though as I said one not purchased without cost.

Whatever interest and success the movie holds is due mainly to the performance of character actor John Litel in the lead. A veteran of both A and B movies (Jezebel, The Fighting 69th, They Died With Their Boots On, Houseboat, The Sons of Katie Elder), Litel was an accomplished performer and underrated actor who could play all sorts of parts but was usually cast as a man of integrity. He takes the hackneyed script and really makes something of his role. He's exceedingly good here and makes you feel all the emotions -- excitement, worry, love, tension, anger, desperation, even murderous rage -- his character goes through. He was much better than the material and makes his every scene count, fortunate considering he's in almost every scene. Marie Windsor and Steve Brodie (as her husband) are also very good. The rest of the cast ranges from adequate (mostly) to poor (a few).

Unfortunately the film was helmed by Edward L. Cahn, one of the most undistinguished directors in the business. Cahn was a longtime B-movie director with a basically pedestrian talent who was hired to get the job done, which he usually did in a matter of a few days. Some B-level directors evinced a great deal of talent that eventually elevated them to important A-films (William Wyler, Frank Capra, Richard Fleischer). Others remained in Bs but achieved critical renown for their handling of low-budget films (Edgar G. Ulmer). Edward L. Cahn's talent was not good enough either to raise him to A status or make him an innovative B director. His handling of his material was stolid and uninspired, his scenes poorly blocked, his actors left to their own devices (one reason it was fortunate he so often worked with competent professionals). If his movies turned out well it was because they had other strengths and he simply managed to convey them. He was better than, say, William "One-Shot" Beaudine but barely equal to Fred F. Sears. Cahn directed films of many genres: comedies, crime, westerns, war, action, etc. (Laughing in Hell, Born to Speed, Gas House Kids in Hollywood, The Great Plane Robbery, Girls in Prison, Dragstrip Girl, Motorcycle Gang, Jet Attack, Guns Girls and Gangsters, The Music Box Kid, A Dog's Best Friend) but is probably best remembered today for the many poor-to-so-so sci-fi and horror flicks he directed in the late 50s: Creature With the Atom Brain, The She-Creature, Voodoo Woman, Zombies of Mora Tau, Invasion of the Saucer Men, Curse of the Faceless Man, Invisible Invaders, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake. His best film was another sci-fi, It! The Terror From Beyond Space, an example of a pretty good little film that succeeeded in spite of Cahn's unimaginative direction. (Cahn's crime expose Inside the Mafia had its moments.) Lest you think B pictures were dying off by the late 1950s, in 1961 alone Cahn directed no fewer than 12 movies, with such thrilling titles as Gun Fight, Gun Street, The Clown and the Kid, The Kid Who Caught a Crook, Operation Bottleneck, You Have to Run Fast and, of course, The Police Dog Story. By contrast, he'd directed a mere 9 films in 1960, but all that effort took its toll: he directed only one film each in 1962 and 1963, the year he died at age 64, worn out, no doubt, by his hectic 1961. He also produced several of his films, including Two-Dollar Bettor.

Which brings us back to Miss Bestor. Here she plays Diane (or "Dee"), one of John's two brunette daughters. Frankly, I would not have recognized her. In Killers From Space, her best-known film, she wore her hair short, in 1954 fashion, acted and sounded adult, and was quite sexy looking. Here her hair is a bit longer, but her features just seem different enough that I wouldn't know her, at least not at once. She's wholesome rather than sexy, or even particularly cute, and she even gets to sing in this movie! (Or mouth the words at least.) It's a nice, homespun scene around the family piano, Diane, sister Nancy, Grandma, and debt-ridden, gambling-addicted Pop. Barbara Bestor is the subject of her own thread on the KFS site, where we wonder what happened to her as no death (or birth) dates are listed and there's no information on her at all, especially after her last acting appearances (on TV) at the beginning of the 60s. If anyone ever reads this, and has anything to say about Miss B., we'd be pleased to have you join us over there.

Several other actors here, like Ms. Bestar (and director Cahn), have a number of sci-fi films to their credits. Marie Windsor (The Narrow Margin, The Killing) starred in the campy Cat-Women of the Moon and weird and static The Day Mars Invaded the Earth. Steve Brodie (A Walk in the Sun, Winchester '73) was in The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Donovan's Brain; Don Shelton (who plays John Litel's brother-in-law) was the New Mexico police chief in Them!. Barbara Billingsley (The Bad and the Beautiful, Airplane!) turns up as Litel's secretary, two years before her bit in the classic Invaders From Mars and six years before she achieved lasting fame as the perfect 50s mom, June Cleaver, in TV's Leave It to Beaver. Even John Litel made his contributions to sci-fi, co-starring that same year in Flight to Mars and a decade later in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Also not to be missed in the cast is none other than Carl Switzer, a.k.a. Alfalfa himself, entering the final decade of his life trying to hang on to his acting career, which, like the life of the protagonist of Two-Dollar Bettor, was circling the drain at this time. In 1959, Alfalfa would end up shot to death by a man he had attacked with a knife during an argument over $50; his killer was acquitted on grounds of self-defense. (Even in death, Alfalfa couldn't get respect!) Here, at 25, Carl plays an unlikely high school football hero and out-of-sync comic relief, symptomatic of the insignificant roles he could wangle for a few bucks at this time. He's lousy, by the way.

The DVD of Two-Dollar Bettor comes, predictably, from Alpha Video, purveyors of public domain leftovers, mostly low budget films such as this but also including occasional major releases whose copyrights were inadvertently allowed to expire by their studios (Royal Wedding, The Big Lift, etc.). Alpha Video is, in every sense, the un-Criterion. For an expensive $39.99, Criterion gives you exquisite, beautifully restored prints of films of the highest quality. With Alpha, you get what your $5.99 or $7.99 or, if you're really ripped off, $9.99 buys: a poor print of the cheapest kind, with, as is Alpha's annoying custom, the original studio logos hacked off. There's some variation in quality but given the likelihood that most of these films were stored away in somebody's desk drawer for 50 years we're probably lucky to have them at all. (Well, usually lucky.) The print of TDB is surprisingly adequate for an Alpha release: fairly clean, only one or two jump-cuts, okay sound, thoroughly watchable. Better, in fact, than I was expecting, which, considering Alpha Video, is a more-than-usual commendation. Running time is 72 minutes.

Overall, I can give a fairly positive recommendation for Two-Dollar Bettor. It deserved a better director, there are off-putting bouts of some misplaced, even quasi-slapsticky, humor during the opening 20 minutes or so, the sets are very cheap-looking, and sequences set in Litel's happy homefront are overdone and pretty poorly conceived. But the basic story is good, and if you give it a while you'll find yourself swept up in the central character's terror as his life spirals into the abyss. There's some real tension and excitement where it counts and the main actors are very good indeed. For an uncomplicated little B picture, and for the price of this DVD, Two-Dollar Bettor offers pretty good entertainment with some genuinely taut and affecting moments.

And hooray for Barbara Bestor!