The Cinematheque

“Edward Dmytryk’s noir thriller had a pronounced influence on both Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Vertigo … Dmytryk directs with a stark, documentary-like precision, offering a sympathetic, if disturbing, portrait of a mind beyond redemption.”

Dave Kehr, MoMA

“The story of a man whose enemy was womankind.” The misogyny of film noir is distilled and driven to its darkest conclusion in The Sniper, Edward Dmytryk’s serial-killer thriller and an evolutionary step between Lang’s M and Hitchcock’s Psycho. The San Francisco-set production stars Arthur Franz, in a rare top billing, as an anguished, mentally unstable laundromat driver whose irrepressible hatred of women culminates in a killing spree. BC-born Dmytryk, one of the original ​“Hollywood Ten,” was extended an olive branch by producer Stanley Kramer to helm the picture after the director served time then named names to lift his blacklisting. The film is notable for obscuring a clearcut rationale for Franz’s bloodlust; less vague is the culpability of a healthcare system oblivious to the warning signs. The studio’s hamfisted marketing stunt of sending bullets to critics proved particularly vulgar when a real-life sniper started terrorizing Los Angeles.

“Very prescient film tragically. A guy takes a rifle, starts shooting people, in San Francisco … But all the noir films—those were the movies that were playing. So you were imbued with this world and then you come out of the theatre and you go home and you’re in that world. Simply out in the streets.”

Martin Scorsese

“The Sniper has the no-nonsense approach and fast-paced style of a superior B‑movie suspense thriller … It is recognized as not just a tautly-directed film noir but a critique of contemporary society and urban alienation inviting comparisons to Martin Scorsese’s later Taxi Driver.”

Jeff Stafford, TCM