- Director: Stuart Heisler
- Genre: Crime
- Movie Type: Crime Thriller
- Main Cast: Albert Dekker, Susan Hayward, Harry Carey, Frances Farmer, Gordon Jones
- Release Year: 1941
- Country: US
- Run Time: 67 minutes
Plot
One of the eerier chillers of its period -- and one of the best ever to come out of Paramount -- Stuart Heisler's Among the Living is a strange and compelling mix of social drama, horror film, and suspense thriller. The story opens with the funeral of Maxim Raden, the patriarch who was pretty much responsible for building up the town that bears the family name, and which has been dominated for decades by the now-idle mill that he owned. Present at the funeral is Dr. Ben Saunders (Harry Carey Sr.), Raden's oldest friend, and the surviving Raden son John (Albert Dekker), who has been away for most of the last 25 years and recently married Elaine (Frances Farmer), a beautiful young woman from New York. John was one of a pair of twin boys; the other, Paul, died in an accident a quarter century ago, just after John was sent away to school. But Saunders and Maxim Raden had a secret between them -- that Paul Raden didn't die, but went dangerously insane, and has kept been alive all of this time, in a hidden room in the decaying Raden mansion, tended to by the doctor and the faithful family servant Pompey (Ernest Whitman). Paul was a victim of abuse by his overbearing father, and suffered brain damage from a beating he received while trying to protect his mother. He has never stopped "hearing" his father's threats or his mother's weeping, and they leave him prone to violent, potentially murderous outbursts of rage. Worse still, the death of his father has agitated him into a state where he is able to escape the mansion. Once freed and relieved of his quarter century of isolation, Paul is at once confused by and delighted with the company of people; he heads to the town and rents a room at a seedy boarding house, where he immediately attracts the attention of the landlady's frisky (and avaricious) daughter Millie (Susan Hayward) with his large bankroll, free-spending habits, and lost-puppy-dog demeanor. Meanwhile, the doctor reveals the truth about Paul to John, who wants to notify the authorities that his brother is loose and potentially dangerous -- but the doctor won't hear of it, fearing that news of the insane son will tarnish the Raden name and the reputation of the clinic that Maxim founded and funded on the doctor's behalf, in return for his covering up the son's existence.The stakes get raised higher when the coroner reveals that a death the doctor tried to cover up was, in fact, a murder, and then a young woman is found strangled. While John is torn between sympathy for his brother, who never got the help or care he needed, and his feeling of responsibility to the town, the doctor tries to continue the cover-up by posting a 5,000-dollar reward for the capture of the killer. This sets off an orgy of assaults and destruction as the work-starved townspeople, led by Millie's ex-boyfriend Bill Oakley (Gordon Jones), begin rounding up anyone who looks even the least bit suspicious or out of place, trying to get the reward. Millie's greed is also brought to the fore and she persuades her new boyfriend, Paul, to go with her to the one place no one has searched yet -- the Raden mansion. Paul's veneer of calm unravels as he finds himself back in the location of his imprisonment, and in the course of the fight and the chase that ensues, John is caught and accused, by Millie and all of the other witnesses to Paul's outbursts, as the killer. Now it looks like a lynching is in the offing as hundreds of angry, drunken, greedy townspeople gather together to mete out justice -- and John must make them believe that he has a twin who is responsible for the murders. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Review
Among the Living was as neat a little B-thriller as Paramount ever made, thanks to the brisk direction by Stuart Heisler, a crackerjack script by Lester Cole, Garrett Fort, and Brian Marlow, and a brace of generally fine performances led by Albert Dekker, who successfully pulls off a dual-role performance. Dekker's years of stage work pays off here, as he does, indeed, create the dramatic illusion of two different people. In John Raden, he effectively portrays a decent, thoughtful, but perhaps slightly superficial man who is suddenly forced to come to grips with the unpleasant truths about his family that he has successfully avoided and evaded for most of his life. And in Paul Raden, he manages to create a portrayal that is frightening -- yet also sympathetic at times -- in a man driven by inner demons not entirely his responsibility. Add to that the work of Harry Carey Sr., in one of the more unusual and complex roles of his career, as a decent man whose one Faustian bargain suddenly threatens to destroy all of the good that he has done; Susan Hayward as a venal young woman, driven entirely by her lusts and desires; and even Jean Phillips in a small, memorable role as a tavern floozy, plus fine little supporting performances by Maude Eburne and Gordon Jones, and the result is a movie that's every bit as entertaining to watch as any of Val Lewton's atmospheric horror films at RKO, yet which also carries with it a topical, sociological component. It wasn't that many years before Among the Living was made that there was an actual lynching in San Diego, or that riots of the type shown here had broken out in various locales around the United States in the '20s and '30s. Additionally, Heisler and company successfully evoke the impression of a seedy factory town, still stricken by the Great Depression and suffering from all of the ills inherent in the "downside" of capitalism. Indeed, there's little that separates the depiction of small-town life in this movie from the vision of Pottersville in the last section of Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, made five years later, except that Among the Living doesn't have a George Bailey or any guardian angels to help set things right. It ends up a wonderfully rich, albeit tragedy-laden movie, crawling with psychological demons that probably resonate better in the 21st century than they did in 1941, mostly thanks to a great lead performance. The only disappointment for modern viewers will be how relatively little Frances Farmer has to do in the movie, as John Raden's wife. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie GuideCast
- Albert Dekker - John Raden
- Susan Hayward - Millie Pickens
- Harry Carey - Dr. Ben Saunders
- Frances Farmer - Elaine Raden
- Gordon Jones - Bill Oakley
