These posters for They Made Me a Killer are about as nice as you’ll find from the mid-century period. They’re both framable classics, so it may come as a surprise to know the film is a bottom budget b-noir, only sixty-four minutes long, and streamlined in plot. Basically, Robert Lowery, who soups up cars for a living, gets suckered by a femme fatale into driving getaway for a bank robbery. He’s literally hijacked. Bank guards die, and a witness is shot.
When Lowery is eventually left behind, the cops pick him up and he tries to explain that he’s a patsy, but they don’t believe him. This leads to an astonishing sequence. Lowery convinces the cops to take him to the hospital, where the fact that he had nothing to do with the robbery can be confirmed by a critically wounded witness. But the witness is barely hanging on and is unable to speak at all.
Lowery decides to escape and upends the hospital bed onto the cops‚ critically injured occupant and all. He hadn’t killed the bank guards, but the guy in the hospital bed surely couldn’t have survived being dumped on the floor. It’s weird and kind of funny, but the scene does let us know the hero’s motivations for finding the robbers may not be as simple as merely clearing his name. You have time to kill? This lightweight thriller is fine. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1946.
