Without Warning! is made in the then-prevailing style of tv’s Dragnet (1951-9) – a hard-boiled detective drama that came with grinding voiceover narration explaining police procedure. It’s certainly fascinating to watch the police procedural and lab scenes, which are like watching a much more primitive version of tv’s CSI: Crime Scene Investigators (2000– ). And it is absolutely fascinating when it comes to the psychiatrist describing killer profiles. These are divided into three types:– the sadistic psychopath – someone who enjoys killing; the epileptic – someone who is said to kill in a frenzy; and the paranoiac – a co-dependant who kills out of revenge over rejection. It is fascinating to contrast these types of 1950s psychological profiles with the modern type of forensic psychology that became all the fad after the success of The Silence of the Lambs (1991).

The killer is cast as a pretty boy psycho in Adam Williams. Director Arnold Laven maximizes Williams for his sexual charisma as much as it could get away with for the time that Without Warning! was made, frequently parading Williams about in bare chest. The camera frequently moves in to focus on Williams’ face, which is babyish and smoothly calm, although often seen covered in sweat to denote his psychosis.

Directorially Laven creates some excellent scenes. There’s a wonderfully showoffy sequence that begins with a platinum blonde toasting Adam Williams across a bar, before Laven pulls back as she walks out from the side of the frame and we realize that the two are communicating in a mirror. Outside her car won’t start and Williams comes along – the dialogue between the two here has a wonderfully flirtatious cool. They kiss and then next we see the car under a motorway overbridge and her dead. Motorcycle cops come to see what he is doing, only for the car to stall in the sand as he tries to pull away. He shoots the officer and then flees as the cop’s partner starts shooting. It’s a stark and marvellously directed sequence, one where we realize that Laven has drawn us into the killer’s point-of-view and created considerable sympathy for him. There’s another fine scene where Adam Williams picks up the lady cop who has been sent as a decoy and drives up into the hills followed by a police tail, where he pulls up and approaches her on a cliff-edge saying “What’re we going to do? Nothing. You’re going to walk home from here. Maybe this’ll teach you that there are some guys that still respect another man’s home.” The climax has a classic scene where Meg Randall ventures into Adam Williams’ house quite innocently, only to find the garden shears, cuttings from the paper about the killer and then put things together when she finds her own photo. And then for Williams to return just as she is about to go, persuading her to stay for a cup of tea even when he sees that she has been looking at his things. Without Warning! is really quite an undiscovered classic – both as an early psycho film and as a work of film noir – and a real pleasure to see unearthed from obscurity.

Buy this film from Dark Sky Films