Ted Tetzlaff’s snappy thriller—adapted from the Cornell Woolrich short story “The Boy Cried Wolf”—straddles the rarely mapped line between Aesop’s Fable and film noir. Nine-year-old Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll) is a fabulist whose lies contribute to no one believing him when he witnesses a murder committed in the Manhattan tenement apartment above his. Woolrich also wrote the story (“It Had to Be Murder”) that spawned Hitchcock’s similarly themed urban thriller Rear Window (coincidentally, top-billed Barbara Hale—as Tommy’s mommy—would go on to play Della Street opposite Rear Window heavy Raymond Burr on TV’s Perry Mason.)
As the principal villain, Paul Stewart strikes just the right deeply unsettling notes of casual, banal evil, while the talented and ultimately tragic child star Driscoll (who appears by “special arrangement with” the man then tightly controlling him, Walt Disney) anchors the thrills with the same animated face later used for reference in Disney’s Peter Pan (Driscoll collected a special juvenile Oscar for his work in this and Disney’s So Dear to My Heart). Tetzlaff, better known for photographing films such as Notorious, effectively matches location footage to practical studio sets, trapping Tommy in a forbidding urban jungle of vertiginous heights, vanishing points, and long shadows.
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