THE FLAMING URGE (1953)

A narrator gives us an odd and very general thesis statement: everyone is different and we all react to things differently, and anyone we meet might be at the mercy of great compulsions we don't understand. Meet Tom Smith (Harold Lloyd Jr., at right), a rather intense looking young man who arrives by bus in the town of Monroe, Michigan. Looking for a new start, he rents a room at a boarding house and gets a job selling ties at a department store, but his first day on the job, he hears a fire engine siren and seems positively aroused, eventually running from the store. The secret he's trying to put behind him is that he's a compulsive fire chaser; whenever he hears a siren, he hems and haws until he goes racing after it and watches the fire being fought. His immediate boss, Mr. Pender, looks askance at this but doesn't fire him (pardon the pun), just tells him to try and control himself. Tom finds out that Chalmers, the store owner, is a fire chaser himself, having installed a fire pole in his second story office to use for his chasing escapades. Chalmers' drive isn’t as all-consuming as Tom's but Chalmers asks Tom to try and withstand his urge. At the fires, Tom becomes buddies with a fire-chasing German Shepherd named Robby and soon has struck up a friendship with Charlotte, the dog's owner. She has a boyfriend, the goofy, prank-playing Ralph, but she and Tom grow close over time. Unfortunately, a spate of fires plagues the town and Tom falls under suspicion for setting them just to see them burn. He tells Charlotte his secret, and she gives him a sealed letter to read the next time he feels the firechasing urge. The letter, telling him that she loves him and is sure he can beat the obsession, seems to work, but the fires continue. Can Tom find out who the real fire bug is before he gets run out of town?

There’s a lot to attend to in this seventy-minute B-film that, oddly, was not made by Ed Wood despite having some similarities to Wood's style and themes. On the surface, it's kind of an off-kilter Andy Hardy movie; despite the talk of obsessions and pyromania, it does have an innocent, almost sweet atmosphere to it. But right off the bat, Lloyd's performance works against the cute small town feel—he plays Tom with a burning-eyed intensity that threatens to send the movie into darker territory, possibly with murder and madness in store. That doesn't happen, but there is another reading which has been posited by several viewers: the "flaming urge" of the title might be homosexuality. Though Tom doesn't exactly have a stereotypical gay manner, he is clearly not experienced at dating women. At one point, a bow tie display he makes is called "flamboyant" as an insult by Pender. When he confesses his problem to a co-worker (an Irish guy who, for no reason, busts out in song at one point and is sometimes quite handsy with other guys), he suggests that his obsession will only go away when Tom gets married and has to take on responsibilities. In a very strange moment, Ralph pulls a prank on Tom by shaking his hand with a big glob of whipped cream that splooshes all over the place. Then there's the phallic fire pole that both Chalmers and Tom use to chase a fire. A climactic fire breaks out in a men's changing booth on a beach where we have caught a glimpse of half-naked boys. At a store picnic, a man tells his wife that he’d been talking to "Mr. McKay, who is in men's underwear," and the wife replies, "Well, I should hope so!" The fact that Lloyd was gay in real life only adds fuel to the (pardon me again fire.

This all might make the movie sound more fun than it is. The primitive visual style, mismatched stock footage of fires, and the lackluster acting of most of the cast all work against it. Though a bit creepy at times, Lloyd is actually pretty good—he never breaks character, and though not instantly likable, you do end up sympathizing with him. Cathy Downs is less interesting as Charlotte, not exactly sleepwalking but not fully engaged. Jonathan Hale (Chalmers) and Bob Hughes (the Irish fellow) are fine, though Byron Foulger, with nearly 500 credits on IMDb, is a bit lackluster as Pender. I found this film after seeing Lloyd in MARRIED TOO SOON, and if this could be restored like that film was, it might come off better. As it stands, the DVD and YouTube prints are pretty shabby. Still, if you're in a what-the-hell mood, you can watch this, laugh at it good-naturedly, and feel fine afterwards. [YouTube]