cult film freak: RICHARD FLEISCHER'S SERIAL KILLER NOIR 'FOLLOW ME QUIETLY'

Title: FOLLOW ME QUIETLY Year: 1949 Rating: ***1/2

If you can handle dialogue like, after a statement about a serial killer killing only during a thunderstorm: "Maybe he likes rain... must be a fish" between detective partners William Lundigan and Jeff Corey, you'll handle director Richard Fleischer's entire b-noir, FOLLOW ME QUIETLY, which is half police procedural on the investigation into and then eventual catching of an allusive serial killer, and a romantic comedy between intense, Hollywood-handsome Lundigan with cute snoopy tabloid journalist Dorothy Patrick...

The latter's too peppy for the dark, semi-violent mainline... although we never completely witness the strangler actually strangling save through a rather rushed flashback from a dying man... but their interplay mostly works since she's a likable actress (yet much better suited as the logical secondary dame in 711 OCEAN DRIVE)... and he's so professionally cold, she's got to really work for her story...

William Lundigan and Jeff Corey in FOLLOW ME QUIETLY

Lundigan, who's both played good guys and bad, is effective in a role initially meant for Lawrence Tierney before RKO fired him... never fully breaking from his uncompromising nature, sporadically curbed by Jeff Corey's more grounded, affable partner while getting the usual barking lectures from the chief... all the while creating a mock suspect from a nightmarish dummy (with a halfway twist both shocking and absurd)...

It's only as FOLLOW winds down, and the killer's revealed... chased through an action-packed sequence through nifty RKO exterior-city lots... that the suspense really knuckles-down into life and death, more resembling the genuinely tight Fleischer vehicle than something he was simply hired to direct.