A Disappointing Continuation

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Those words didn't come from Ed Stagg's (Lloyd Bridges) daughter, or even his dysfunctional son-in-law. It was the Sarge himself trying to convince Broderick Crawford's derelict drunk to take the fall for the accidental death of Louise Campbell (Anne Helm).Here's an idea - how about tracing the call made to the police station from Campbell's apartment at the time she was killed? Didn't anybody think of putting THAT two and two together? And with twenty five years on the force, the person on the phone at the station didn't recognize Stagg's voice?Maybe Broderick Crawford should have been in charge of this case like he was in the prior year's TV flick, "Ransom Money". On second thought, that one didn't turn out so well either. That might have been the one that drove him to drink.

A corrupt police sergeant who is perversely attached to his imbecilic daughter oversteps boundaries with impunity until he makes one fatal mistake.This 1971 melodrama is dated and overacted but is quite entertaining for just those reasons. (However, it does end a bit too lamely in a conventional twist that reminds one of how cynical movies have become...) I hadn't seen Lloyd Bridges since "Sea Hunt" and enjoyed him in this hysterical bad-guy role. Not at all a bad film to watch at home alone on a non-descript weeknight.

This film is a low budget drama which is chiefly remarkable for containing one of Broderick Crawford's finest performances, as a befuddled drunk who has murdered his best friend but doesn't remember doing so, and an intense and convincing performance by Lloyd Bridges (father of Jeff and Beau). Bridges plays Police Sergeant Ed Stagg who is obsessively devoted to protecting his grown daughter, whom he raised alone after her mother ran off. He discovers that his daughter's husband is having an affair, and he orders him to stop it. Things get out of hand and someone ends up dead by accident, but dead is dead, and a cover-up is necessary. So we get involved in a whodunnit where the who is concealed, and will this all unravel? Bridges is rather terrifying in his obsessive love for the dreamy and over-protected daughter, and the extremes to which he will go. He reveals terrible things about his own childhood as the story progresses. It is an engrossing film.

A critically important component of virtually all successful cinema is suspense, a perception of uncertainty within the viewer as to what may ensue from the events occurring upon the screen, whichever genre, present even when we know an outcome (Apollo 13) if the work is done well; all of which is meant to point to a total absence of suspense in this weakly directed feature, which dully plods from scene to scene until its flat ending. Lloyd Bridges, cast as police sergeant Ed Stagg, has discovered that the husband (Frank Converse) of his daughter Tina (Sallie Shockley) is dallying with a local chippy and during Stagg's attempts to end the adultery, he accidentally commits a murder, upon which he forges a plan to place responsibility for the crime upon a local inebriate, tangentially providing a question of the title: was Scott's "What a tangled web we weave..." (Marmion) the intended source, inaptly transposed into "tattered"? (an amendment that would be of a piece within this poorly crafted affair). The film is steeped in cliché, hampered by a witless score, and the acting from the three mentioned leads is often embarrassingly bad, notably in the case of Bridges, which might be attributed to the hackneyed script if it were not that Anne Helm as the doxy and Murray Hamilton as Stagg's partner manage to make something of their material, while Broderick Crawford rises above his during his few scenes.