HIGH
SCHOOL BIG SHOT (1959) – A Review
My wife and I have been getting ready
to go to the Film Noir Festival in San Francisco by watching movies set and
shot in San Francisco – including Dirty
Harry (1971), The Conversation (1974)
and Zodiac (2004). Without even
including The Sniper (1952) and The Lineup (1958), it sure seems like SF
is a great city to get murdered in, eh?
Anyway, we’ve also been taking some
controlled, appetizer-like doses of noir films, so I introduced my wife to a rough
little gem she had never seen. Said gem is High
School Big Shot, a film that, thankfully, does not live up to its title. Unlike films with remarkably similar
titles from that period – like High
School Confidential! (1958), High
School Hellcats (1958), High School
Caesar (1960), etc. – HSBS tells
a story that doesn’t focus on school at all, though the lead character, Marv
Grant (Tom Pittman) is a high school student. But the majority of the film
takes place away from the school, and it’s really a fairly tight little crime
picture with a somewhat misleading title.
Marv, whose father is a no-good drunk,
is hooked on Betty (Virginia Aldridge). But Betty has her sights set on landing
a guy with lots of dough, which leaves poor Marv on the outs. Marv thinks he hears
opportunity knocking when he overhears his boss at the warehouse planning a big
buy of heroin, with said deal requiring a million bucks to be – briefly – placed in the safe in the
warehouse. So Marv finds some help to crack the safe and score the cash. Meanwhile,
Marv’s told Betty his plans, and she in turn tells her caveman boyfriend about
the deal – and he and his pals plan to rob the robbers after they empty out the
safe. It all ends with a lot of gunfire and more characters dying than not.
So yeah, the title isn’t so accurate,
and yeah, the actors playing high school students are well past their teens.
But, other than that, I think this is a solid little crime picture that should
satisfy crime and noir fans quite well. The plot is simple, but engaging. There
are some familiar character actors sprinkled throughout the cast (Byron
Foulger, Malcolm Atterbury, Stanley Adams). The lead, Tom Pittman, is a suitable
noir-type fall guy undone by a dame. And the ending is certainly pretty bleak. What’s
not to like?
Postscript: In a sadly noir-like
ending in real life, Pittman, who some were touting as the “next” James Dean,
died in a car crash on Halloween in 1958. So this film, his first leading role,
was released posthumously not quite a year later. He was 26 years old.
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