cult film freak: WILLIAM CAMPBELL & KATHRYN GRANT IN 'CELL 2455, DEATH ROW'

Kathryn Grant with Robert Campbell in 1955 Rates: ****

William Campbell plays it snarky, sneaky, cocky and blocky enough to be a young James Cagney in a homage of those 1930's gangster flicks...

And Campbell, as real life death row inmate Caryl Chessman changed to Whit Whittier, has little brother Robert playing his younger self, stealing hot rods for thrill moll Kathryn Grant; eventually switching dame-gears to a faithful Marian Carr, waiting for her grown-up prison-hopping career criminal boyfriend to come home.

The action-packed bravado flows nicely from one set of scores to the next, and eventually includes future star Vince Edwards as one of many partners-in-crime (also including Joe Turkel)...

Sometimes b-movie director Fred F. Sears rushes through what should be more fleshed-out, like a stint at Folsom using stock footage, but the death row inmate's eclectic (narrated) crimes on the outside is what matters. Too bad the 11th hour mysteriously-shot scenes of a Lover's Lane Killer, who may or may not be our likeable yet cursed, no-good loser, only adds to the now too-obvious agenda to get the real guy (who'd die five years later in 1960) from the gas chamber. Basically, CELL 2455, DEATH ROW is a better action-packed Film Noir than biopic melodrama.