From the MGM Vaults: The Mugger (1958) MOD
“We need good cops, even if you are a psychiatrist now.”
When a filmmaker has a severely limited budget and a short time in which to tell his story, he learns economy of filmmaking. In the 1958 psychological drama The Mugger, that economy arrives in the first spoken line. By filming the scene in the police department and having the conversation take place between two detectives, the filmmaker takes a shortcut to let the audience know that Dr. Pete Graham (Kent Smith) is both psychiatrist and detective.
Throughout The Mugger other shortcuts are used, particularly coincidence. With an iffy cast and lousy screenplay, it all comes off as trash, and the film is only worth watching if it’s so bad it’s hilarious. The Mugger is based on the eponymous novel by Evan Hunter writing as Ed McBain. It tells the story of a serial mugger that Dr. Graham is assigned to catch. Graham is not only a psychiatrist, but he’s also a profiler, although that term is never used. He suggests the kind of perp the detectives seek by analyzing his MO and behavior.
After a dozen attacks in which the perp cuts the handle of his victims’ handbags and then inflicts a small cut on their cheeks, fleeing with the purses, the violence escalates to murder. The capable cast (including James Franciscus as the cutest cab driver on film, and Rene Taylor as a flirty floozy who beats her husband) carries the whole thing off without a hitch. Sure, there are clichés and unlikely coincidences, but viewers must remember that the film was made in 1958.
Although The Mugger is a mystery offering a number of likely suspects (one of whom is “a bit of a screwball” {George Maharis]), most audience members will have nailed the perp in the first fifteen (of its 74) minutes, a result of time constraints and viewers’ previous film watching experience. Unlike many films from the same era, The Mugger keeps the psychobabble to a minimum and isn’t too far off the mark.
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