BY JOHN M. WHALEN

In the opening scene of Republic Pictures “The Man Who Died Twice,” (1950) a car drives along a mountain road and two cops in a patrol car remark that it’s nightclub owner T. J. Brennon (Don Megowan) passing by. Next thing you know the car goes off a cliff and explodes in flames. Then a woman (Vera Ralston) gets out of a cab in front of her apartment building and looks up at the balcony where two men are fighting. She shrieks in horror as one of the men comes plummeting down and lands on the sidewalk at her feet. Splat! She watches as the other man climbs up a fire escape ladder to the roof. But not before a third man appears on the balcony and the guy on the fire escape shoots him. Vera Ralston faints from all the excitement and falls on the pavement next to the fallen corpse. 

The cops show up almost immediately, revealing that the two dead men are members of the narcotics squad and the unconscious woman (whom they just leave lying there on the concrete until the ambulance arrives) is none other than Lynn Brennon, wife, now widow, of T. J. Brennon, the guy who went over the cliff. All this in just the first few minutes of this low-budget 70-minute crime movie directed at a frantic pace by Joe Kane, veteran of countless Roy Rogers and Gene Autry movies., and penned by Richard C. Sarafian, who would later be best known as the director of “Vanishing Point” (1971), the ultimate car-chase movie.

“The Man Who Died Twice” is a pulpy story that borrows a lot from other crime and gangster movies of that era. It’s a coincidence, I suppose, that this film was released the same week as Don Siegel’s “The Lineup,” but the similarities in the two films are pretty striking. The McGuffin (Hitchcock’s term for the thing everybody’s after) in both films is a missing stash of heroin. In both films, dangerous drug dealers want their drugs back and will stop at nothing to get them. In both films two of the more interesting characters are a couple of gunsels who arrive from out of town to get the goods back for their employers and in both films the heroin is stuffed inside a doll. It makes you wonder if Serafian and Stirling Silliphant, who wrote “The Lineup,” had some kind of competition going to see who could turn out the better script using the same story elements. Silliphant wins that one hands down.

The gunsels In “The Lineup,” are played by Eli Wallach and Robert Keith. Gerald Milton and Richard Karlan handle the roles of Hart and Santoni in “The Man Who Died Twice.” While not quite on a level with Wallach and Keith, they do a good job as the two killers. Milton is particularly nasty in a casual kind of way in a scene in their hotel room when he hears a cat meowing outside the door. He goes out in the hall, picks it up and puts out on the window sill and then shuts the window. Karlan yells, “Hey, what’s the matter with you. It’s three stories down.” Milton keeps calling his wife back home only to be disturbed by the fact that she’s never there when he calls. He tells Karlan that one time a bartender pal gave him the number of a hot babe, if he ever wanted a good time. Half-drunk he put the number in his pocket and didn’t look at it until the next day and found it was his home phone number!

Vera Ralston as Lynn Brennon was only 35 at the time this film was made but she looks tired and bored. She was an ice skating star back in her native Czechoslovakia when Republic Studios chief Herbert J. Yates brought her to the U.S. and tried to make her a star. She made over 20 features for Republic but despite Yates’s efforts audiences did not really accept her, and she quit acting after “The Man Who Died Twice.”

The leading man in this B-movie extravaganza is Rod Cameron, who has about as much charisma as a side of beef. Better known for his westerns, he plays Bill Brennon, T.J.’s brother, who had sent him a telegram asking for help, which was unusual because he and Bill hadn’t spoken in 15 years. But you know how it is, when your brother sends you a wire saying he’s in trouble, you gotta do something about it. Right?