Private Property, the previously-lost 1960 sorta-film noir opening tonight for a one-week run at the Grand Illusion Cinema, is a fascinating rediscovery, a tiny but palpable representation of the restlessness, sexual tensions, and horrors bubbling just beneath the placid surface of Eisenhower-era suburban Americana.
That underbelly of darkness and ambiguity sees its physical manifestation in the form of Duke (Corey Allen) and his slightly-slow buddy Boots (Warren Oates), a pair of drifters who wind up breaking into a vacant house next door to Ann (Kate Manx). Blonde, beautiful, and well-to-do, Ann spends her days quietly languishing while her oblivious husband Roger (Robert Ward) leaves her alone in the couple’s snappy-looking hillside home. And thanks to Roger’s grunting indifference to his wife when he’s not at work, things aren’t much warmer when he is around.
In short, conditions are ripe for a prototypical film noir descent into sexual infidelity, psychological manipulation, and eventual violence. But writer/director Leslie Stevens feature isn’t as much a film noir as it is an unsettling slow burn of a psychological thriller. The sociopathy of the film’s two antagonists is established in the opening five minutes when they hitch a ride—at knifepoint—with an insurance salesman, and they leer at bikini-clad Ann through the windows of their temporary home with disturbingly wolfish intensity. We know these guys are up to no good at the outset, but given the antiseptic numbness of her gilded-cage existence, Ann’s vulnerability to Duke’s shy-guy act seems sadly plausible.
Warren Oates, all character actor awesome in PRIVATE PROPERTY.
Stevens enjoyed a lengthy career in the boilerplate environment of network television, but Private Property feels right in line with Stevens’ memorable detours into unusual passion projects, all of which feel like ahead-of-their-time cult classics with hindsight. His most famous turned out to be TV’s first great cult series, the low-rated but brilliant The Outer Limits. You can see the beginnings of that sci-fi show’s visual palette all over Private Property, with black-and-white photography oscillating between bright gauziness and horror-movie shadow (camera operator Conrad Hall eventually became a world-class cinematographer on movies like American Beauty and The Road to Perdition).
Compelling as it is, it’s not perfect. At just 79 minutes, the movie rushes through its last ten minutes like a chicken on fire, undercutting a lot of the subtly-creeping dread it builds in its first hour-plus with a hasty finale. And Alfred Hitchcock presented amoral malcontents with latent homoerotic chemistry committing awful acts with more assurance in Rope a few years earlier.
The performances help elevate Private Property to nigh-unmissable status. Beloved character actor Oates is probably the big cinephile draw in an early role here, and he’s great. With his bow-legged stance, black Brillo-pad curls, and eternally squinting eyes, he’s oddly charismatic—alternately sympathetic and creepy. Allen, by contrast, was best known for his supporting turn in Rebel Without a Cause some five years previous. Private Property represents one of his rare leading roles, and he makes the most of it, imbuing Duke with enough quiet charisma to capably camouflage his amorality.
The big revelation here is Kate Manx, whose Ann starts out as the epitome of the vapid blonde Stepford Wife before fissures of unacknowledged frustration begin playing in her eyes. Stevens (then Manx’s husband) often makes the audience as flagrant a voyeur of Ann as Duke and Boots are, letting the camera linger on her while she’s sitting poolside in her bikini or reclining provocatively in curve-hugging capri pants. But there’s intelligence and quiet melancholy beneath her gleaming California-girl-grown-up exterior (the melancholy feels all the more resonant given Manx’s tragic suicide four years later).
This is, at its core, a low-budget thriller, so it’s a little presumptuous to put too much weight on it. But it’s also informed by shadings that feel almost contemporary. I won’t spoil things by revealing whether Ann breaks out of her suburban shackles to live free, or whether she winds up in the staid comfort of her husband’s arms in the end. Either way, though, her old life—the American Dream as forced on women of the Eisenhower generation—has been inexorably exposed as the sham it was.
Private Property runs through August 18 at the Grand Illusion Cinema. Tickets and more info are here.
