'KEY WITNESS'..........GOOD DEEDS, SEVERELY PUNISHED.......BY RUBY DOOBY

Key Witness (1960)     Here's a fave we're way overdue getting around to.......

                   What a wonderful excursion into pulpy trash.......expertly guided by B-movie war-horse Phil Karlson.......(like fellow "B" maestro Don Siegel, it wasn't until the 1970's that Karlson's talent for lurid melodrama and stark violence came into full flower......)

                     But in 1960, something like "Key Witness" had to straddle the border between straight-laced 50's morality and the emergence of pure nihilistic mayhem as an audience gooser.

                      Coming from MGM and its veteran house producer Pandro Berman, "Key Witness"  features multiple angles of  hot button exploitation...........including Revenge-As-Catharsis, which became its very own genre in the 1970's.....at the hands of, you guessed it, Phil Karson and Don Siegel.

                        Its primary concern, with an actual quote from a California District Attorney to start out, is the ongoing apathy of citizens to help the cops catch criminals........the sorry state of a populace unwilling to "get involved" when they witness crime.......

                       Exhibit A:  Suburbanite Fred Morrow (Jeffrey Hunter), who faces endless woe when he does his civic duty by identifying a teen punk psycho (Dennis Hopper) as a knife-wielding murderer. 

                      Hopper does express some regret at knifing people......since it messes up his hair.....(honest).

                         Unlike the wonderfully scruffy strange delinquents that Pandro Berman featured in "Blackboard Jungle", his  'Key Witness gang looks ready for a beach party movie.......the clean cut young Hopper, 'Rebel Without A Cause' leftover Corey Allen, hyper-overacting 'Gidget' sidekick Joby Baker, songwriter Johnny Nash as the Poitier-Lite black member........as best of all, Susan Harrison as the gang's lethal Queen Bee, Ruby........

                          ...........or as the supposed drugged up Joby Baker calls her....Ruby Dooby Dooby.

                       Relatively unfettered and uncaptured by the impotent police, Hopper and Company wage terroristic war on Hunter, his darling wife and cute children.  When Hopper's finally picked up for trial, Ruby Dooby assumes command of the mission to intimidate Hunter out of testifying......

                      Susan Harrison, previously the innocent waif caught in the crossfire between Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in "Sweet Smell Of Success", makes a fearsome Ruby Dooby......assaulting Hunter's wife outside a courtroom, no less.....and engineering  the attempted kidnapping of Hunter's young son, which ends with the child seriously wounded by gunshot........

                     At this point, the movie briefly dips its toe in 'Death Wish' type of revenge.......with Hunter properly bug-eyed with rage as he and convert-to-redemption Johnny Nash take on the gang in Hunter's living room.......

                       But the ensuing fight is a disappointing, typical one-two-three-kick affair, no better or worse than a thousand other punch-ups from 1950's movies......(as all movie buffs know, Karlson's up-and-down career hit its very peak with his blood-soaked redneck revenge opera "Walking Tall" with Joe Don Baker......a perfect vehicle for a now unrestrained pulp fictioneer.....)

                      Phil Karlson's a total pro, though.......and he keeps 'Key Witness' hoppin' and poppin' even constrained by the limits of what he could accomplish in a standard MGM product. Still a lot of fun to watch.........3 stars (***)......what more could we ask.....Ruby Dooby even gets her own song.