Private Property

PRIVATE PROPERTY   ***1/2

Leslie Stevens

1960

IDEA:  Two drifters with eyes on an upscale suburban woman infiltrate her Beverly Hills home.

BLURB:  Bolstering its nervy B-movie rawness with aesthetic elegance and psychological realism, Private Property is so potent precisely because it takes its sordid premise so seriously. As a result, what is essentially the stuff of tawdry erotic fiction becomes a vehicle for filtering the suburban discontent of postwar America, its classed and gendered frictions ideally suited to the economic desperation and psychosexual mania of noir. As the ruffians who weasel their way into a woman’s Beverly Hills mansion, Warren Oates and Corey Allen are excellent at embodying shades of masculine entitlement as well as curdling sexual frustration. Allen, playing the ringleader, is especially effective, his weary bravado and pathetic entreaties adding an undertow of vulnerability to the film’s portrait of violent male disaffection. And as the bourgeois housewife, Kate Manx makes poolside life pulse with a resonating sadness. Increasingly revealing eddies of ambivalent desire beneath her cautiously polite demeanor, the actress manages the tricky feat of convincing us of her lust for Allen’s rogue, that he might be the closest she gets, physically and psychologically, from escaping her gilded cage. The depth the trio of actors bring to their performances, plus nicely understated support from Robert Wark, fills the feverish chamber drama with an intense and authentic-feeling unease; a seeping malaise that not even the privileged in their elevated Los Angeles homes can keep out.