Crane Wilbur - Film Noir Foundation

tured Ben Welden as a prisoner seeking vengeance against John Litel).
For The Story of Molly X, Wilbur followed the now-familiar process
he’d used with Foy. He spent time in Tehachapi, where he got to
know a number of the female inmates—one of whom was doing life
for killing a man who kicked her cat. Wilbur said that the inmate who
served as his model for Molly X was not a heist leader, but instead a
woman on death row for her part in the murder of an elderly man.
During his research, Wilbur discovered that Tehachapi had a
branch of Alcoholics Anonymous. He and his actress wife, Lenita
Lane, attended an AA meeting in Los Angeles to learn more about the
organization. A cameraman who knew the Wilburs spotted the couple
there and asked, “Which one of you is the drunk?” Wilbur initially
fingered his wife, jokingly, until explaining it was all “research.”
Wilbur’s second Rosenberg-Universal film as director-writer was
Outside the Wall (1950). It’s the story of a parolee (Richard Basehart)
who finds work at a sanitarium, determined to go straight. His
resolve is tested, however, when he falls in love with a mercenary
blonde nurse (Marilyn Maxwell), and encounters a former prison
acquaintance (John Hoyt) who’s pulled off an armored car robbery.
Though the first reel features prison sequences that were shot on
location at Philadelphia’s ancient Eastern State Penitentiary, the rest
of the film takes place on the “outside” and is largely studio-shot. It’s
not helped by an overblown music score.
While Wilbur was at Universal, Foy had re-established ties to
Warner Bros., and in 1951 he summoned his old collaborator to
rejoin him. Crane’s first assignment was strictly as a writer (Gordon
Douglas directed) on Warner’s contribution to the cycle of anti-Communist
propaganda then being produced by Hollywood studios. I
Was a Communist for the FBI was based on a series of Saturday
Evening Post stories by Matt Cvetic, which told of Cvetic’s real-life
adventures posing as a Red to get the goods on Communist spies
using a Pittsburgh steelworkers union as a front. The propaganda
56 noir citY i SPrinG 2011 i www.filmnoirfoundation.org
is laid on thick in the Wilbur-penned
film, with Frank Lovejoy playing Cvetic.
Yet, if the Commie spies in the story
had been replaced by syndicate mobsters,
this film could have easily fit into
the cycle of Kefauver hearing-inspired
racket-busting films then in fashion. For
Crane Wilbur, however, it was definitely
a step away from the reality-based work
of many previous films—which made
it particularly ironic when this movie
(though based on Cvetic’s memoirs, it’s
a 100% shot-in-the-studio fictional film)
was nominated for an Academy Award
as Best Documentary of 1951.
Back in the Joint
Next, Wilbur was back in the director’s
chair for the fourth in a quartet of
prison-themed films he directed as well
as wrote between 1948 and 1951. Inside
the Walls of Folsom Prison is not
as dramatically gripping a film as Cañon
City, nor is it as strong a character
study as The Story of Molly X. Yet, of
all the films he directed, Folsom may be
Wilbur’s signature work in terms of its
influence and its unique presentation. Narration had been a staple
of procedurals, prison or otherwise, for some time. However, Inside
the Walls of Folsom Prison is the first film narrated by a prison itself:
I am Folsom Prison. At one time they called me Bloody Folsom—
hah! And I earned the name. I’ve been standing here in California
since 1878. My own prisoners built me, shutting themselves off
from the free world. Every block of my granite is cemented by
their tears, their pain—and the blood of many men.
A little later, the narration asserts: “If I couldn’t break a man’s
spirit, I broke his bones.” However, lest one be led to expect a prison
version of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” this
Steve Cochran is one of the cons Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison