Jack Nicholson made his debut on the big screen with this acceptable thriller from the series B, subsection youth and violence, produced by Roger Corman, in which he shares the cast with Carolyn Mitchell, a beautiful and young actress totally forgotten, who shortly after the end of filming would become nothing more and nothing less than the fourth wife of Mickey Rooney before passing away tragically.
Virtually the entire career of the director, Jus Addiss, was focused on television, and that is something that shows for good in the planning and staging of the film, with a sustained rhythm and without ups and downs. The youthful story of love, jealousy and violence in which Nicholson takes refuge in a small grocery store armed with a gun and with hostages is nothing to write home about and even focuses more on what happens around those hours than in the Nicholson himself, who in his performance already accurately outlines some of the grimaces of a patient with hemorrhoids that later made him famous. But the movie, I already said, is quite effective and has its charm, especially in the opening sequences in the dive where Mitchell and the badass thug for which she has left Nicholson (Brett Hasley) are whisteling sweet nothings surrounded of some other guys.
Without lacking from a sociological point of view, although seasoned with humor, the usual morality of the B-series movies of the time that deal with the subject of youth and delinquency, another of its assets is the elegant and beautiful presence as a secondary role of Lynn Cartwright, a lady who would later have a long career in projects of a different kind.
Among the presences that one cannot fail to notice in the large casting there is also, although it does not even appear in the credits, the always friendly and usual characteristic of the Corman gang at that time, Bruno VeSota, a guy who always gives a consistent looking to the shots and that, as director, that same year he had done for the "The Brain Eaters". As with Corman everyone did everything, may be someone told him to stay and gave him a phrase so that the tape in its final section would not decay.
In the same way that in moments of tension, the soundtrack resorts to more sandunguero Latin jazz, in the vein of Gillespie's Latinbop, so that things do not go downhill. Those are the kind of things that are appreciated in this type of cinema.
