Still one of the most rudely unsung directorial voices in Hollywood history, Cornel Wilde began producing and then directing his own movies in the mid-'50s, as he saw the decline of choices loom in his leading-man career. The big picture is that on the strength of three fast, vicious, pulp-amok films, all of them struggles for survival - The Naked Prey (1965), Beach Red (1967) and No Blade of Grass (1970) - Wilde fashioned crude, startling visual argot as abrupt, savage, churlish and, finally, infantile as any the movies have ever seen. Watching the films, you may certainly get the sense, as critic David Thomson memorably suggests, of "watching the first films ever made," but what's more, you may sense that an untamed id is being stoked, and you can get a reawakened sense of how deep in our reptile brains the fears, hatreds and needs of being alive still lurk unappeased by the narcotics of technology, fame, ritual and entertainment. For this later chunk of his career, Wilde's breakneck brand of genre moviemaking had the cruel simplicity of folk art, and the achievement can still leave friction burns on your eyeballs, and exclamation points exploding in your head.

Where this sensibility came from can be a vexing question, if you start with his rather bland acting career, in which he is best remembered as being noir-persecuted, and overshadowed, by strong and secretive women - Gene Tierney in Leaver Her to Heaven (1945), Linda Darnell in Forever Amber (1947), Ida Lupino in Road House (1948). There were scads of grade-B swashbucklers, and only his reliance on brawn and anxiety gave any indication of his future filmmaking M.O. As an actor, his personality couldn't find a foothold. But if you look at the first film he directed - Storm Fear (1955) - you can see the real Wilde emerge, as if from a strait-jacket. A palm-sized, claustrophobic noir scripted by Horton Foote (his first screenplay), the movie is stagey but madly intense, as though three or four people trapped in a room together is the de facto equivalent of a barrel of gasoline and a thrown cigarette. The set-up is peeled for us like an onion, and it's not simple: in a remote cabin in the Adirondacks, an uneasy and destitute family dynamic idles, between anxious Mom (Jean Wallace, aka Mrs. Wilde), watchful 12-year-old son David (David Stollery) and sick and depressed Dad (Dan Duryea), whose writing career is at a dead end. In through the door without announcement comes a familiar noir ingredient: the small band of outlaws on the run (a gunshot Wilde, Lee Grant's weathered but empathic moll, and Steven Hill as the sociopathic muscle with no taste for the wilderness), looking to hole up after a robbery in the city, and possibly take the quaint domestic unit as hostage if need be.

Only slowly do we realize that Wilde's gangster is in fact the Dad's bad-seed younger brother, and that the boy is actually his - and everyone knows it except David, whose dawning awareness parallels our discovery of the lingering, sexually impulsive, bitter romantic bond between Wallace's Mom and Wilde's hood. (As she grows angrier with his endless pattern of irresponsible neglect and criminal instinct, he grows guiltier about the boy's situation, and therefore more sympathetic.) Of course the situation in that tiny cabin begins to boil over, as the kid looks to subvert the interlopers, the despairing Dad becomes instantly convinced that his brother and his wife are planning to run off together again, Hill's hair-trigger gangster (who's already left one body behind him) begins to get violent, and with the law presumably approaching, the bank robbers decide to force the boy to guide them on foot over the mountains. The journey takes up the third act, on snowshoes, shifting the moral weight of action away from all of the adults and onto David, who realizes he alone must put an end to the story.

Pile onto all of that, in 88 minutes, the directorial climate Wilde brings to the situation - everything percolates in the key of Goddamn, with everyone ready to ignite at any second. The relationship between Wilde's bad boy, crippled from a bullet and trying for the moment to keep everybody satisfied, and Wallace's furiously heartbroken Mom begins at a sweaty, stricken pitch and then rather graphically moves toward moments of stunning sexual stress. In fact, we're pelted with concerns about Wallace's sexual availability - a bizarre narrative element to jump out at you from a '50s noir, and especially in regards to Wallace, who's no vamp but instead a warm and self-sacrificial hausfrau. Dennis Weaver, as a kind and courtly ranch hand, shows up drunk, and as everybody else hides and listens, confesses to his ardor for Mom, and makes a plea to take her David away. Wilde cuts back to the secret eavesdroppers, guns at the ready, and we're in Wallace's shoes as she tries to fend off the only completely decent adult in sight, in order to save everyone's lives.

Storm Fear is distinctively thick with anxiety; the characters in aggregate suffer more humiliations and guilty freight than in any other noir one could think of. Wilde's budgets were never large, and he never cared for the professional polish that might've made a cheap movie feel slick, and his debut in particular is glaringly inexpensive, with studio pickup inserts standing out obviously from the mix. But those are formal details, which in the case of noir is never much of a pertinent matter. In the case of Wilde, it can be seen as part of his directorial signature - a willful disregard for fluid professionalism that translates into a love for raw, cut-to-the-bone emotional tension. Index him against Samuel Fuller, Phil Karlson and Don Siegel (not to mention contemporaneous Japanese New Wavers like Seijun Suzuki and Kinji Fukusaku), and he shines as a hyperbolist auteur of struggle and human damage.

By Michael Atkinson