Not all films that have been lovingly restored are worth the effort. Consider The Yellow Canary (1963), a low-budget crime movie directed by Buzz Kulik, carefully restored under the auspices of Eddie Mueller's film noir foundation. The movie sounds promising and had gone missing until a camera negative was discovered about a year ago -- in 2024 or 2025. The film stars Pat Boone, the crooning pop star from the late fifties and early sixties, the epitome of straight Christian virtue and as far from the burgeoning hippie and beatnik scene as imaginable. (There's a rumor that is said to be true that Pat Boone baptized Bob Dylan in his Hollywood swimming pool --reported in the New York Post in February 1979). Boone is playing a misanthropic cad, again acting against the wholesome type that his publicity projected, a crooner very much similar to the star himself but meaner and more callous and sexually unfaithful to his wife, a thankless role acted by Barbara Eden. (She was later to disport herself in a harem slave costume on the TV show I Dream of Jeannie.) What's more, the movie was written by Rod Sterling, the reliably cynical and ingeniously effective creator of the Twilight Zone and the author of a number of respectable film noir including Requiem for a Heavy Weight. With this kind of cast, a director who proved himself later in the TV market, and Rod Serling as screenwriter, The Yellow Canary was optimistically imagined as a lost masterpiece. It's nothing of the kind and has nothing, except novelty, to recommend it. Furthermore, the movie was made cheap and looks cheap. In fact, the money ran out and Pat Boone, who hoped the vehicle would be his ticket to serious roles in Hollywood, had to finance the completion of the film with his own money -- the weird credit telling the audience that Cooca Mooga Productions made the film is a cover for the fact that "Cooca Mooga" is really just Pat Boone funding the movie with his own money.
Pat Boone playing a glorified lounge singer, Andy Paxton, is a bad man. He despises his thousands of teenage girl fans, cheats on his luscious wife, and ignores his infant son. He bullies his assistant, Bate, a weakling with whom he grew up, and, even, taunts his muscular bodyguard, Hub, who, in turn, despises him. At a show, Paxton is planning to cheat on his wife, but, when she attends, with his 11-month baby boy, someone snatches the child, killing the infant's nursemaid. Paxton is asked to pony-up $200,000 for return of the kidnapped infant. A detective, well played by Jack Klugman, is assigned to the case. There are various poorly staged twists and turns as Paxton tries to figure out who has snatched his child. (Klugman is left with very few things to do other than to bemoan Paxton's refusal to cooperate with the cops.) It turns out that the kidnapping is an inside job. The long-suffering Bate gets strangled and, then, picturesquely hanged from the back wall of Paxton's Hollywood mansion. A money-launderer who has nothing to do with the kidnapping has to be found. The loathsome Hub, the muscle man, tortures a prostitute to find the money-launderer. But when Paxton and the cop go to the man's apartment, he has been stabbed to death. (Why? he had nothing to do with the kidnapping plot. And by whom?) Paxton finally figures out what the audience grasped about two reels before the climax. The crooner is spectacularly dim-witted and his wife is even worse. The crooner rescues the baby and tosses the kid to his waiting wife. Then, the script (or the script girl responsible for continuity) forget all about the baby who mysteriously vanishes from the end of the movie -- kidnapped again? The happy ending is Paxton whispering sweet nothings to his wife and shaking hands, at last, with Jack Klugman's dogged, but ineffectual, detective.
The movie is cheap and its economy shows. Things go to hell about 10 minutes into the movie when there is very long scene, all dialogue, and staged as a motionless master shot in which all the characters are visible. The scene is horribly dull. When something goes wrong with the shot, Kulik cuts away to an optically printed close-up from the master shot. The movie is made in cinemascope black and white, and the inserted shot isn't adjusted for the anamorphic lens -- the image doesn't even remotely match the scene in which it's embedded and seems oddly squeezed in dimension. Sets are flimsy and seem ready ready to fall over. A juke box is made of cardboard and when Pat Boone brushes against it, the thing almost topples. Boone slips and falls or trips himself about four times in the movie but the errors are not corrected. Barbara Eden has next to nothing to do other than loudly wail and bitch at her useless husband -- her part is severely underwritten. With the exception of a few hardboiled lines and exchanges, Serling's script is awful -- it starts out okay but collapses in the long scene, presumably shot after the movie lost funding, in one continuous, if botched, take. The acting is very bad. Boone himself has no idea what he is doing and can't even hit his marks without stumbling over his own feet. The only bonus to the film is that we do get to see the performance by Boone of a couple of songs, morose tough guy ballads, that sound like Frank Sinatra as sung by a twerp. Boone has a pretty voice and his singing in the mode of a callow punk Sinatra is the best thing in the movie. In film noir, there's always a scene in which a tough guy is thrown in jail to cool his heels until someone bails him out so that he can continue to get used as a punching bag by the bad guys. These jail shots are characteristically showy, filmed with moody bars shadowing the imprisoned man. The cameraman in The Yellow Canary can't figure out how to light the jail scene and its falls completely flat. Indeed, the whole movie is shot in the sourceless, slightly surreal and indistinct white light that characterizes TV shows from the early sixties -- somehow, light, which is the agent and protagonist in film noir has been stripped of its glamor.
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