cult film freak: INSANELY BIZARRE CRIME MELODRAMA 'BACK DOOR TO HEAVEN'

Wallace Ford and Patricia Ellis in BACK DOOR TO HEAVEN Year: 1939 Camp Value: ***

One of the strangest, most awkwardly melodramatic and yet somehow insanely intriguing 1930's crime flicks ever made, beginning with the fact that a skinny Jimmy Lydon, as young harmonica thief Frankie Rogers... who shares a single scene in a classroom with kids that would turn into adult actors playing them later... bares absolutely no resemblance to bulky Wallace Ford, who always seemed as if he'd never been young...

By the time Frankie's an adult, locked up in a prison after... having been locked up as a kid... a few minutes will pass before you realize it's supposed to be the same person... like a new character's introduced that will eventually meet the kid we've been following... Yet now we're in the second act as if the first never happened...

Wallace Ford with Stuart Ewrin and Bert Frohman in BACK DOOR TO HEAVEN

Where Ford's Frankie and two prison buddies are paroled after a rushed montage of life in stir, and wind up casually roaming the countryside, like hobos contentedly going nowhere until, at one point they're eating from plate of food at a small town diner that mysteriously catches on fire...

Then all three wander around, the plates still in their hands and continuing to eat, even when one of the cons, from out of nowhere, suggest they go into a dance hall where he... Bert Frohman as Bert Gatto... winds up crooning in a professional voice backed by a barbershop quartet...

William Redfield in BACK DOOR TO HEAVEN

The bizarre journey of BACK DOOR TO HEAVEN isn't only what random stuff occurs, mostly from out of nowhere, slowly, but how the characters act along the way... as if taking a tour through someone else's movie that hasn't figure out who the star is, or the plot...

But there's a kind of theme since young Frankie had a dysfunctional family and, as noted, a classroom of kids who wind up adults at a reunion run by the hometown banker: the younger version's played by future ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST actor William Redfield, and, ironically, the sophisticated jerk he turns into is the kind of roles Redfield would wind up playing (especially Jack Nicholson's stuffy CUCKOO'S foil Mr. Harding)...

Patricia Ellis in BACK DOOR TO HEAVEN

Strange story short, and since every old movie needs a love interest... the girl Frankie knew as a kid is now a singing star... and when their rekindled romance almost begins (despite moon-face beauty Patricia Ellis having zero chemistry with chubby Ford), those once seemingly affable ex-con buddies — also including a previous Oscar winner Stuart Erwin — kill a store manager they're robbing, and ALL THREE wind up... get this... on death row...

This deliciously ludicrous play in purgatory ends with Frankie, having easily escaped, turning up at his reunion where the greedy banker's lectured by his old friends and even older teacher and, when Frankie runs in he says a few words about life and love until...

Patricia Ellis and Van Heflin in BACK DOOR TO HEAVEN

Oh, wait... almost forgot that a young Van Heflin plays one of the grownup kids... who had sung a song in class with the girl... becoming an honest, idealistic lawyer attempting to save Frankie...

And the picture ends with James Cagney lookalike Heflin and the real Cagney's once-cinematic love-interest Anita Magee hearing gunshots... with Frankie's name on each, and... let's just say there's never been a lonelier, emptier, weirder experience than watching BACK DOOR TO HEAVEN, especially if you'd just happened to happen upon it.