Step Down to Terror [The Silent Stranger] ** (1959, Colleen Miller, Charles Drake, Rod Taylor, Josephine Hutchinson, Jocelyn Brando) – Classic Movie Review 13,583

Charles Drake stars as a killer on the lam who takes refuge in his childhood home where his mother (Josephine Hutchinson) and widowed sister-in-law (Colleen Miller) are ignorant of his criminal past, in the 1959 film noir Step Down to Terror.

Director Harry Keller’s 1959 Universal International Pictures film noir crime thriller Step Down to Terror [The Silent Stranger] is based on the story Uncle Charlie by Gordon McDonnell, and stars Colleen Miller, Charles Drake, Rod Taylor, Josephine Hutchinson, and Jocelyn Brando, along with Alan Dexter, Ann Doran, and Rickey Kelman.

On a visit to the town where he grew up, killer on the lam Johnny Walters (Charles Drake) acts strangely and sometimes menacingly to his family, and lets slip increasingly bizarre comments, which gradually reveal that he is a dangerous serial killer of widows. Both sweet widowed sister-in-law Helen (Colleen Miller) and his mother (Josephine Hutchinson) are ignorant of his criminal past and are initially thrilled to welcome him back, desperately hoping he will stay, and so does Helen’s little son Doug (Rickey Kelman). Johnny starts showing romantic feelings towards Helen and even offers her a ring with someone else’s initials inside. But soon Helen starts to smell a rat and then she finds her life threatened. Rod Taylor plays Mike Randall, the visiting plain-clothes police detective posing as a reporter who falls for Helen.

This pointless, though interesting rehash of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 masterpiece Shadow of a Doubt is inferior to the original in every way possible: some of the writing, acting and handling is quite tedious, and the story plays out mechanically and artificially, with little tension or few quirky details to maintain tension and suspense. Nevertheless Colleen Miller and Josephine Hutchinson are effective, even credible, and a hard-stretched Charles Drake uses his ruggedly manly personable appeal to move in a flash from being between mellifluously smiling to commandingly menacing. His creepy turn just about works.

Universal Pictures ensure that the film is briskly professional. It has a decent Fifties noir look about it thanks to Russell Metty’s black and white cinematography and Alexander Golitzen’s set designs, using the Universal backlot to considerable advantage to create the villain’s hometown neighbourhood. And Gordon McDonnell’s story Uncle Charlie is good crime stuff, even though the film messes up elements of it, particularly the rushed and unconvincing ending.

Rod Taylor’s police detective character defeats him entirely, particularly with his desperately contrived instant attraction to the heroine, though the character is flat and uninteresting, and behaving illogically. And Jocelyn Brando’s eccentric turn as family friend Lily Kirby doesn’t work at all. But Colleen Miller has a lot to do and does it well, making her character sympathetic and the actress’s short career inexplicable. There are some good lines of dialogue and various flashes of a better film entirely that help to keep it completely watchable.

Margaret McDonell, the head of David Selznick’s story department, had told Hitchcock that her husband Gordon had an interesting idea for a story that would make a good movie. Uncle Charlie was based on Earle Nelson, a serial killer of the late 1920s known as The Gorilla Man, the first known serial sex murderer of the 20th century. Hitchcock named Shadow of a Doubt the favourite of all his films and the one he enjoyed making the most (though he also said: ‘I wouldn’t say it is my favourite picture’).

Technically, however, Step Down to Terror is not a remake of Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt but a retelling of Gordon McDonell’s original story on which Hitchcock based his film.

There’s a great thriller score over the opening titles, but all the score is uncredited stock music,

Josephine Hutchinson went on to appear in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959) and Rod Taylor in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963).

Colleen Miller was born on November 10, 1932 in Yakima, Washington. She started with small roles in The Las Vegas Story (1952) and Man Crazy (1953), which led to a contract at Universal, where she became a second-rank star in Westerns and film noir, notably Playgirl (1954), Four Guns to the Border (1954) and Man in the Shadow (1957). She starred with Tony Curtis in The Purple Mask and The Rawhide Years. But her top billed role in Step Down to Terror was more or less the end of it for her. She mostly retired in 1958 (though she did the 1963 Audie Murphy Western Gunfight at Comanche Creek) for a life with her camera manufacturer Ted Briskin and two children. Her second husband was Walter Ralphs, heir to the Ralphs supermarket chain.

Rickey Kelman [Ricky Kelman] (born July 6, 1949) had a 20-year acting career from 1954 to 1974 as child actor and young adult actor. He acted with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball in the 1962 movie Critic’s Choice. He was licensed to practice law in California in 1977 and retired in 2007. 

© Derek Winnert 2025 – Classic Movie Review 13,583

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