Forgotten Noir: Door-to-Door Maniac (1961/1966) Bill Karn

Johnny Cash as You've Never Seen Him Before...

When I was a band director, every high school band competed annually at the state band festival, and each performance was recorded. Immediately after sitting through one of the most laughable train wrecks I’d ever heard, the local recording company was overrun with orders for that group’s performance. Everyone just had to have a copy of it. I experienced a similar feeling after watching Door-to-Door Maniac (1961). It’s such a bad film, but I can’t imagine a world in which it doesn’t exist.

Yes, I realize I just wrote an article about life being too short to watch bad movies, but here’s one you should watch, and yes, even own.

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For the film’s American International Pictures re-release in 1966, producers James Ellsworth and Lodlow Flower changed the original title Five Minutes to Live to the much more exciting Door-to-Door Maniac. (You’ll see why in a moment.) In his feature film debut, Johnny Cash plays hardened criminal Johnny Cabot, who decides to team up with his sleaze-bag buddy Fred (Vic Tayback) for a caper that can’t miss:

Johnny, with guitar case in hand and posing as a door-to-door salesman, will ring the doorbell of Ken Wilson (Donald Woods), the local bank vice president. Johnny and Fred have observed Ken’s routines and know that when he’s at work, his wife is at home and their kid is in school. Once inside the house, Johnny will take Ken’s wife Nancy (Cay Forester) hostage while Fred visits Ken at the bank, demanding $70,000. Fred will tell Ken to call home just long enough to prove he’s not lying. Johnny has been instructed to kill Nancy if Ken hasn’t called back in five minutes.

What could possibly go wrong? And to spice things up a bit, Ken has been seeing another woman and was planning on divorcing his wife anyway, so what’s the problem? The problem is that Ken and Nancy’s little son Bobby (Ron Howard, billed here as Ronnie Howard). Wait, isn’t he supposed to be in school?

“Ring of Fire,” here we come…

The film is clearly bad, but there’s an odd, unmistakable energy coming from Cash that you can’t turn away from even if you wanted to (and you don’t). All this is served up with a side order of ridiculousness, but before you can start laughing, it becomes terrifying. The scenes with the Wilson family are awkward and goofy, which makes every moment Cash holds Nancy hostage genuinely unsettling by contrast. Young Ron Howard almost steals the show and would have if Cash were a little less menacing.

Cay Forester not only played the role of Nancy, but she also wrote the script. You may remember her as the married woman who tempts Edmond O’Brien in D.O.A. (1950), but she co-starred in other B pictures and appeared uncredited in A pictures such as Advise & Consent (1962) and Airport 1975 (1974). Read more about Forester and her overlooked career in this article by Susan King for Film Masters.

Perhaps most astounding of all, Door-to-Door Maniac, produced for $300,000, made an incredible $5.6 million at the box office. I’m certainly going to pick up this Blu-ray from Film Masters. Perhaps you will, too. Like the band recording I mentioned earlier, I can’t imagine a world in which Door-to-Door Maniac doesn’t exist.

Door-to-Door Maniac will be released on Blu-ray and DVD from Film Masters on August 27, 2024, but you can pre-order it now. (I’ll mention this and several other films in my New Releases in August video, coming in just a few days to my YouTube channel.) The release also includes the bonus feature Right Hand of the Devil (1963), which you can read more about on the release’s webpage, which also includes information on audio commentaries and other bonus material.