Stop, I'll shoot! A low-budget, eight-day, $100,000 black-and-white gangster film from the spiritual father of many Hollywood Oscar-bearers, Roger Corman. This time Corman presented to the public Charles Bronson, for the first time playing the main role.
The story is based on real events. George Francis Barnes, Jr., nicknamed “Kelly the Machine Gunner,” was a gunman in the 1930s. That's what Bronson played. Ruthless, stubborn, he laid out his machine gun and his own and others, without looking. But there was a hole in his armor: he was panicked about death, and the cemetery symbols caused a stupor in him. And to hide this weakness, Kelly showed even more cruelty to others. One day, Kelly decides to play big and kidnaps the daughter of a local industrialist for ransom. Corman's joke is that the hero of the film demands from the father of the family $ 100,000 - the budget of the picture.
As is often the case in Roger Corman’s films, the plot is ragged. For example, Kelly’s game with a tiger locked in a cage was never brought to a logical conclusion. Weakly spelled characters of the assistants of the main character. But the miracle is how good Susan Cabot is in the role of a fatal woman mandatory for noir. And young Bronson proved the ability to portray negative characters more reliably than positive ones.
A special mood is created by the music of Gerald Fried. At some point it even seemed that it was Corman’s creation that prompted the Italians to the ideas of the Eurocrime genre.
7 out of 10