not horrible nor great

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.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Tough guy Lawrence Tierney portrays a disgruntled and dishonored cop who finds menial work as a bodyguard, and ends up wanted for murder! Becoming tied in with corruption at wealthy widow Elisabeth Risdon's meat factory, putting up with her abuse and nasty assistants, and fighting other criminal elements in his efforts to clear himself. Post war cynicism and big business apathy play a large role in getting this complex story off the ground with a psychological darkness that truly reflects the downward turn in society after a war that had briefly united the entire free world. This tight, short film noir is one of those unique ones that is almost in a class by itself. It's dark even when the lights are on, and really tests the limit of the code with violence, anger and ugliness. Priscilla Lane exits the sweetness of the four daughters as Tierney's girlfriend who finds herself in danger in her efforts to find the real killer. This is where the camera takes over, almost becoming a character, showing the intensity of audience emotion, the fear in Lane's eyes as she is closed in, and the evil inside the killer's soul as they target Lane's vulnerable mouse like a ravenous cat. The moody tension outweighs the predictability to where clichés are practically ignored and gives the audience moderate satisfaction at the conclusion.

For what it is,this is a thoroughly enjoyable 40's detective flick.Mike Carter (Tierney),gets sacked for punching his superior in an office fracas and becomes tempted into protecting a rich,meat packing business woman from some unscrupulous characters.......oh and gets framed for the murder of his previous superior in the process.Assisting him is Doris Brewster (Lane),his girlfriend who still works in the police station he once frequented,and is able to provide Carter with valuable info from police files now out of his reach.At a runtime of just over an hour,a movie like this needs to have a cracking pace,and this movie doesn't disappoint. It has all the action,intrigue,humour and suspense you could need,including some great one liners delivered by Tierney,all thanks to Richard Fleischer's direction.You really cannot go wrong with this one.

This is a relatively short low-budget little sleeper from 1948. For the money spent, this is a wonderful film--with good gritty acting and a dandy fast-paced Film Noir script. Like many Noir films, the actors are generally not top-tier names and faces--and this is a plus, as this both heightens the realism and intensified the experience. Lawrence Tierney plays a hot-headed cop who would rather beat a confession out of a perpetrator or search a home without a search warrant. As a result, he's suspended from the force. But, being such a volatile and violent person, he takes this poorly and tries to push his boss' face out the back of his skull--so he's fired.Later, a stranger approaches him with a huge wad of cash and wants to hire him as a bodyguard. Tierney, though, is a smart guy and smells something fishy--the money is too good and there MUST be a catch! However, he eventually relents and is pulled into a vicious murder conspiracy and is set-up to take the fall!! So, in Noir fashion, he needs to avoid the cops AND prove his innocence.All this works so very well,...that is up until the end. While his girlfriend, Lane, is fine in most of the film, at the end she stupidly goes to the hideout where the murders are hiding and is herself in great danger. This "brain lapse" is pretty inconsistent with the rest of the film and seems more like a cliché than anything the characters really would have done. But, aside from that, it's a fine and entertaining example of the genre.

A consensus seems to exist among commentators on Richard Fleischer's Bodyguard, based on a story by the young Robert Altman. The consensus is that, as it stands, it fails to satisfy; the background to this verdict is that somewhere there is – or at least was – a longer cut of the picture that probably would have been, if not a little masterpiece of film noir, a less nettlesome movie.Feral Lawrence Tierney, a detective fired from the force for insubordination, gets offered the job of bodyguard to a old woman whose wealth comes from the meat-packing industry. At first reluctant, he accepts when shots shatter a mirror in the woman's home. Following her on a nocturnal errand, he's coshed on the head and comes to in his car parked on railway tracks; riding shotgun is the police officer who fired him, dead. Now the prime suspect, he lams up.Assisting him in his efforts to clear himself is Priscilla Lane, his mole in police headquarters. (They devise a curious means of communication. She reads the files onto 78s and delivers them to a record store where he listens to them in a booth.) It turns out that his murdered superior investigated the death of a meat inspector at one of the plants owned by his employer....What remains of the movie is directed with pace and even some style by Richard Fleischer (The Narrow Margin, Armored Car Robbery, The Boston Strangler; he showed a lot of sass in his early days, before he ossified into a hack.) But what we lack compromises what we have. The 13 minutes excised from the movie somewhere along the line no doubt patch up the holes in the leaky plot – like, who knew Tierney was off to the optometrist's office and set up the ambush? A fuller version would probably make, as has been remarked, for a more grisly final confrontation, a la Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, in the meat-processing plant; in the print in common circulation, it abruptly fizzles out. Certainly, that's the lack most keenly felt. What with the meat saws whining and the meat grinders rumbling, surely Fleischer did not conclude the story with the malefactor hurling an empty pistol, bootlessly, at Tierney – to be followed, almost instantly, with Tierney and Lane leaving on their honeymoon. Somewhere out there, a few links of blood sausage are missing.