cult film freak: JANINE GRAY AND DYSON LOVELL IN 'PANIC' WITH BRIAN WESKE

Title: PANIC Year: 1963 Rating: ****

By the end of John Billing's 1963 Neo Noir PANIC, a has-been boxer, who just got a pounding in the ring, is about to be killed by a punk crook in a back alley, and what climaxes into a sparse b-movie was quite complicated and surreal, beginning with what should have been an easy jewelry heist that morphs into the most hackneyed plot device ever...

And bad old amnesia's thrust upon lead ingenue Janine Gray, the secretary where the diamond got swiped by a gang plotted by her boyfriend played by an edgy, James Cagney-looking, trumpet-playing loser Dyson Lovell as Johnny, sending two goons including JUNGLE GIRLS lowlife Brian Weske and a mug-faced Stanley Meadows...

Janine Gray and Brian Weske in PANIC

But PANIC only seems to be about these seedy crooks until the entire plot deliberately derails into a nighttime odyssey by amnesiac ingenue Janine Gray as Janine, who, like ODD MAN OUT, becomes an unwitting post-heist victim of street-life circumstance, happening upon an eclectic lot ranging from a lusty landlord to a deranged Beatnik painter...

And then something, or rather, someone happens, and it's that heart-of-gold palooka who winds up saving the girl from rowdies in a swing cafe and, while he's about fifteen years older, their lack of romantic chemistry makes for an endearing friendship the otherwise busy story almost completely settles into, and for once the audience has real human beings to genuinely care about, ramping-up suspense when that aforementioned gun-toting climax nears.