The tag line for Key Witness (1960) said it all: "Violence - vengeance in the big city!" And few directors of the time were better equipped to handle a story like that than Phil Karlson. Working from a 1956 book by famed crime novelist Frank Kane (his only book to be adapted to film), Karlson and his screenwriters fashioned a stark, paranoid tale of an ordinary guy, a suburban real estate salesman, who witnesses a gang murder in downtown Los Angeles. Being an upstanding citizen, he calls the police and offers the only eyewitness testimony of the crime. But the brutal street gang tries to silence him and his family with a campaign of terror.

"Every successful picture I've made has been based on fact," Karlson once said. Although this film was adapted from a novel and not a true story, it might have been taken directly from front-page headlines. America's inner cities at the time were becoming increasingly dangerous, and frightened citizens moved through the streets with their heads down, determined not to get involved for fear of attracting the kind of violence experienced by the characters in this story, an attitude that would reach its most deadly and shameful proportions in the 1964 murder of New York resident Kitty Genovese, stabbed to death while 38 of her neighbors watched from their apartment windows. "Key Witness was the highest acclaimed picture in New York because [it] was happening on the street at that time," Karlson later remarked in a 1973 interview. "They were mugging them in Central Park then. That's what the story was all about. People would not get involved."

By the early 1960s, Karlson had built a fairly solid career on tough, tightly constructed action melodramas that were merely successful B pictures of their day - popular but quickly forgotten Ð but have since been critically re-appraised: Kansas City Confidential (1952), 99 River Street (1953), The Phenix City Story (1955), The Brothers Rico (1957). He began his directing career as an assembly-line filmmaker at low-budget studio Monogram Pictures, taking whatever assignments he was given. But with Black Gold (1947), a project he talked Anthony Quinn into, he got his first real chance to infuse a film with his own vision. According to Karlson, Monogram was so impressed with the final product, they decided to ramp up the studio's production schedule, changing its name to Allied Artists and ushering in a new, more ambitious slate of films.

By the time of Key Witness, Karlson had worked his way over to MGM, where his producer, Pandro S. Berman (the Astaire-Rogers films at RKO are among his credits), was so displeased with the picture he had his name removed. Despite the success of Key Witness, Karlson, who was rarely singled out for critical praise or notice, knocked out a string of unambitious B-movies over the next decade, among them Kid Galahad (1962), the Elvis Presley remake of a 1937 Humphrey Bogart flick and two Matt Helm spy spoofs starring Dean Martin (The Silencers (1966), The Wrecking Crew, 1969). He finally achieved major success and respect with his runawayWalking Tall (1973). However, he made only one other film (Framed, 1975) before his death of cancer in 1985.

The leading role of the besieged suburbanite is subtly handled by Jeffrey Hunter, a handsome young star who prior to this had appeared in a number of John Ford films, including The Searchers (1956). The boyish looking actor's biggest success came a bit later, playing no less than Jesus Christ in King of Kings (1961), often jokingly referred to by critics as "I Was a Teenage Jesus," although its star was 33 at the time. His career never again reached the heights of that role, and he died suddenly at the age of 42 from a cerebral hemorrhage following a head trauma.

At least one member of the violent street gang, however, fared much better in his career - Dennis Hopper as the sadistic leader. Also in the gang (as the only black member) was Texas-born Johnny Nash, who had a hit song in 1972 with "I Can See Clearly Now," a reggae tune written by Jimmy Cliff. And as the gang "girl," Susan Harrison made her only other film appearance after her promising start as Burt Lancaster's emotionally crippled sister in Sweet Smell of Success (1957). Her current claim to fame is as the mother of Darva Conger, the "winner" in FOX TV's controversial reality show Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire in February 2000.

Director: Phil Karlson
Producers: Kathryn Hereford, Pandro S. Berman
Screenplay: Alfred Brenner, Sidney Michaels, based on the book by Frank Kane
Cinematography: Harold E. Wellman
Editing: Ferris Webster
Art Direction: Malcolm Brown, George W. Davis
Original Music: Charles Wolcott
Cast: Jeffrey Hunter (Fred Morrow), Pat Crowley (Ann Morrow), Dennis Hopper (William "Cowboy" Tomkins), Susan Harrison (Ruby), Johnny Nash (Apple).
BW-81m. Letterboxed.
by Rob Nixon