SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Micransix Crappy film

Clarissa Mora The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

bkoganbing Western Pacific Agent with Kent Taylor in that title role is the story of a railroad cop investigating the on the job murders of two employees. This particular Lippert Production rises a notch or two above the usual Lippert film with a pair of guys with blacklist troubles.Morris Carnovsky and Mickey Knox who were having trouble getting work at the larger studios play father and son. Knox commits a payroll robbery and kills two employees of the Western Pacific to do it. The nature of the crime suggests some familiarity with the town and the railroad operation. The Western Pacific's top cop Kent Taylor gets the case.This film really belongs to Knox who gives a great performance as a stone cold killer. Before the climax Knox kills a fence who was holding him up in a deal.Carnovsky suspects right away that it could be his son, but he dare not say anything and hopes his suspicions are wrong. He's a very good friend of Sheila Ryan whose brother Robert Lowery was one of the first pair of victims. Carnovsky will bring a tear or two to your eye as a father who desperately hopes his son is not a killer.Lippert films went quite a bit beyond their normal quality in bringing Western Pacific Agent to the movie-going public in 1950.

MartinHafer Lippert Productions made some very low-budget film noir style films. They are generally enjoyable (there are exceptions) but one inexplicable thing detracts from many of them. Burlesque (and grade-z) comic Sid Melton is in most of the films--for absolutely no apparent reason. His had comedy works horribly with this sort of gritty film and you wonder if he was Lippert's son or something! Now I liked Melton on "Green Acres"--here his hokey humor was fine, as the show was a comedy! Here, he only serves to frustrate viewers like me who love noir. Why would they want a kooky eye witness?!?! Apart from Sid, the rest of the movie ain't bad for a B. It tells the story of a nice sociopath who returns to his home town--only to go on a killing and maiming spree. It's a nice portrait of a man without a conscience and they did a pretty good job of telling the story, but it also seems more like a TV episode in quality--especially since every time a stunt was needed, they cut away from the picture!!! Cheap! But otherwise, not bad--and I agree with the reviewer who called this 'film noir lite'--kind of like noir, but a cheap stripped down version.

Gunn Another in the Lippert Films series, this is a typical B-movie with a no-name cast, save character actors Dick O'Neil and Sid Melton, wooden acting and directing and a simple plot/story. Still, it is an entertaining film, albeit cheesy by today's standards. The script is also sophomoric but somehow engrossing. Western Pacific Agent involves detectives who work for the railroad solving crimes and other dilemmas, in this case the murder of a railroad payroll carrier and another victim. This is included in Forgotten Noir Vol. 4, a set of B-movies that are, if nothing else, good fun to watch. They have a style reminiscent of 1950s television dramas. You won't find any 'method acting' here.

django-1 There are many excellent crime programmers buried within the output of Lippert Pictures, and here is another one. Yes, it's full of clichés (perhaps I should call them "archetypes"), but it is delivered with such sincerity and style that I was caught up in the story and cared about the interesting collection of characters. Like many Lipperts of this era, the cast is superb. Mickey Knox (who has had a long and interesting career both in Europe and in the USA) is a fantastic cold-blooded killer; Kent Taylor brings his usual touch of class to the title role; Sid Melton, a Lippert regular, is added for comic relief as a near-sighted mail-order detective school graduate (!!!), Robert Lowery (in his supporting actor period, after many excellent starring roles in the 40s) as a local railroad employee who is an early victim, and a very moving performance by Morris Carnovsky (acclaimed actor and also blacklist victim) as Knox's father, who knows what his son has become yet still loves him and believes he can change. There is a genuinely shocking moment near the end of the film between Knox and Carnovsky. The "wraparound" story seen briefly at the beginning and end of the film is outrageous and would be laughed out of any Screen writing 101 class, but these filmmakers were not interested in winning Oscars; they were delivering an entertaining and exciting piece of product for the tired working people who put down their money at the third-string neighborhood and small-town theaters that booked Lippert Pictures. If you like unpretentious action films (there are no noir elements here, although Knox's portrayal of the psycho killer will appeal to many noir fans), this one really delivers the goods. I watched it twice upon getting a copy recently and marveled at how efficiently it was constructed and how professional the end product was. There's also an interesting subplot involving the hobos who ride the trains and have camps near the train tracks--their society is depicted in a sympathetic and interesting manner. It's just one way that this film, which on one level is simply a genre crime-film product, is actually a very special piece of work that is far better made than it needed to be in order to fill its niche.