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San Francisco Chronicle​

This 1962 San Francisco-set thriller is largely forgotten. Here's why

Hi Mick: Why is 'Experiment in Terror,' the 1962 noir movie filmed in San Francisco, largely forgotten today? It is seldom mentioned on lists or in books of movies filmed in the city. I'd advise everybody who is now 20 years old to make a list of the 25 films from the past five years that they believe are worthy of immortality. Then they should wait until they're 83, get out the list and count how many times over the course of the next day people under the age of 83 drop 'Deadpool & Wolverine' into the conversation. But 'Experiment in Terror' isn't entirely forgotten. It has an entry in Alain Silver and Elizabeth's Ward's book 'Film Noir,' and Eddie Muller has talked it up on TCM. It's around. Hi there Bonnie: I can think of a few, but if I go around calling actresses adorable, nobody will believe me when I praise their performances. So for the sake of all those adorable women out there, I'm going to remain silent. Hi Mick: Wondering if you agree with Foster Hirsch in his 2023 book 'Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties' when he writes in his epilogue: 'At a pivotal moment [the 50's decade] . . . released more great films than in any other ten-year cycle in the history of American movies.' Donald Miller, Walnut Creek Seriously, what did you expect him to write in that epilogue? 'Upon further reflection, I realize now that the Fifties kind of sucked, and I shouldn't have wasted five years of my life writing this book.' Writers tend to avoid discouraging remarks like that. But no, I don't agree with him. Despite some great films, like 'Sweet Smell of Success' and 'A Face in the Crowd,' both from 1957, and several Hitchcock movies, the 1950s was one of the worst decades for American cinema in the 20th century. It was not good for actors and horrible for actresses. Musicals were bloated. Film noir was becoming an imitation of itself. And in matters of sex and romance, the '50s were a toxic mix of puritanism and prurience, with potentially great women like Marilyn Monroe enacting parodies of femininity that even a drag queen would find excessive. If I were to rank the decades of the 20th century in terms of movies, I'd put the 1930s at the top, followed by the '70s, and then the '90s, the 1920s, the '40s, the '60s, the '80s, then the 1950s, the 1910s and the 1900s. Hi Mick: I've just watched seven Hitchcock movies, and I liked six of them, but there are so many leaps of logic both in scenes and in dialogue. It seems that the audiences of those days, by today's standards, must have been incredibly obtuse. Did the critics of those days notice things like this? Rocky Leplin, Richmond Hi Rocky: They definitely noticed, enough so that Hitchcock used to call critics 'the plausibles.' They were the only ones who cared about that sort of thing. But Hitchcock didn't care about what was plausible. I think of it this way: When I want to see something plausible, I look in the mirror. When I want to see something implausible, I watch a movie.