In spite of the location shooting, this crime movie (certainly not a film noir) is nothing but typical, boring Stanley Kramer fare with some police procedures, a tendency of the times. It's nothing but a much too long lecture about the necessity of preventing crime by having more psychiatrists than cops and more insane asylum than prisons. It has badly aged and is quite uninteresting actually. THe characters are unbelievable, the cops as well as the preaching psychiatrist. I guess you might call it a liberal movie (though it was the Mc Carthy era) but if you're not a liberal, not a chance to be convinced by the message in the film. The idea is "criminals are human beings too and too often, society refuses to listen to them and our indifference to those suffering souls is the main cause of crime". Add to it that the crowd is cruel and insensitive (that old lady who says "I hope they'll kill him" among others) and the film was made from the point of view of the killer and its quite misogynistic : all women are horrible (he is thus to be forgiven if he kills them) especially Miller's boss. It was a strange idea to revive it on DVD as part of the Columbia Film Noir series (Movies were mostly non-noir except the very modern "Murder by contract" directed by Irving Lerner.
Review of The Sniper
