It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Good movie but grossly overrated

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Among the Living opens on a funeral. The patriarch to a wealthy family has died, and the man's son, Albert Dekker, returns home to pay his respects after twenty-five years away. Harry Carey, the family doctor, and Ernest Whitman, the family servant, are glad to see him but wary of his return to town. Twenty-five years ago, Albert's twin brother died, and ever since, Harry and Ernest have been keeping a terrible secret from the family and the town. . .There's a lot more to the plot, and if you look this movie up on IMDb, you'll read much more than I'm telling you. However, I think it's more exciting sometimes to watch a movie without knowing too much about it. There are lots of surprises in this thriller, and it's great to watch around Halloween. Yes, it's a little dated, and Susan Hayward's acting is atrocious, but if you like the campy black-and-white scary flicks from the olden days, turn off all the lights and huddle close to your popcorn!

A more or less routine programmer enlivened by a sparky performance from a cute, young, flirtatious, materialistic, and cheerfully candid Susan Hayward.Albert Dekker plays twins, the sons of a wealthy mill owner in a Southern town. The story has their identities getting mixed up, madness, a murder, the wrong twin blamed, and so forth. Such mix ups aren't rare in the theater or movies. Except for the fact that it's a dramatic thriller, it might have inspired by Shakespeare's first play, "The Comedy of Errors", or from Plautus, from whom Old Bill ripped it off in the first place. But in fact the origins of the idea of mixed identities and twins is probably lost in the mists of the Mousterian Age.Where was I? Oh, yes. Okay. So we have this double Dekker, a Zweidekker, if you like. John Raden -- that's the SANE Dekker -- has been sent off to school at about the same time the other Dekker, Paul, has begun to show signs of what passes for insanity in this B feature. His eyes are open wide and he wears an idiotic smile. He speaks in a high voice and is ingenuous in the way an innocent child is. He's without art or guile. Except when he hears women scream. Then he turns into a raving maniac and has an unfortunate tendency to strangle people during a vesuvian outburst.He strangles his old African-American guardian, Pompeii, who has been taking care of him in the old, wrecked family mansion. That's the mad Dekker I'm referring to. He's been kept secretly in a locked room upstairs, sometimes wearing a straight jacket. The friendly old town doctor, Harry Carey, signed a false death certificate for Paul in an attempt to save the wealthy family any embarrassment. So the whole town mistakenly thinks Paul is dead, just as the world of pop music would think in 1968.John returns to the town, intending to re-open the mill, which had closed during the depression. Frances Farmer, who looks striking, has practically nothing to do as his wife. Sane John and beautiful Frances put up in a hotel rather than return to the dilapidated mansion which folks now believe to be haunted. We don't see much of them for the remainder of the film.The story follows the goggle-eyed Paul. After strangling Pompeii and stealing a horde of cash, he wanders the streets of the town, which is all new to him because he's been locked up for two decades. And it's certain he's never been allowed to look at anyone as sexy and forthcoming as Susan Hayward, the daughter of the boarding house keeper where Paul rents a room. Her character is chipper and she brings some life into what is otherwise a rather somber and not very interesting narrative. I might observe that it's a little odd to hear these Southerners -- Hayward, Dekker, and Harry Carey -- in conversations. Two are from Brooklyn and one from the Bronx.I don't think I'll gave away the end, though I guess we can mention that it involves a frenzied pursuit of the innocent Dekker by a lynch mob. There are multiple implausibilities towards the end and one big hole. John can't prove that he's not Paul. Nobody believes him, since they think Paul is dead, right? But Frances Farmer, John's wife, is right there, looking fretful but standing silently among the mob members. She could save his bacon with a few words, but then we wouldn't have the villagers with their torches and pitchforks shouting and hooting as they chase the innocent Dekker through the studio woods.

Deranged twin brother escapes home confinement after father's death and tries to fit into a new life.Wacky, highly original horror story. When the luscious Hayward (Millie) makes her entrance at the stairs' top, it's like an explosion of saucy sex appeal. There's enough lively personality there to light up the room. In fact, her gold-digging coquette manages to steal the film. And that's against tough competition from Dekker as the wide-eyed, strangely sympathetic mad strangler. Together, they're easily one of filmdom's genuine odd couples.Frankly, the story at times makes little sense. But that's okay because it's the characters and Gothic atmosphere that distinguish the film. It's also one of the few films where the camera pans through a hellish mansion, only to focus finally on a guy in a straitjacket (Dekker as the mad Paul), of all things.Catch that opening scene with the unemployed mill workers taunting the funeral rites for the mill owner. In fact, there's an odd class undercurrent to the screenplay as a whole. Considering that blacklisted leftist Lester Cole did both the story and the script, that's not surprising. Moreover, the screenplay can be viewed as something of an allegory with mad brother Paul as the brutalized innocent, who would like to side with the workers (he prefers living with them), but has been too damaged by his mill owner father to be able to. In that sense, he suggests Dad's repressed (straitjacketed) humane side hidden away from public view, but finally released by Dad's death into a world his now childlike nature can't comprehend. More tragically, he can only relieve a woman's scream of pain by strangling her, the memory of his abused mother and his attempt to help still fresh in his mind. Dekker's affecting performance with its unexpected degree of pathos underscores, I believe, something of this way of looking at things.Director Heisler certainly has a flair for exciting crowd scenes. That clip joint with its frenetic swing dancers is a marvel of editing and atmosphere, a really memorable scene. And those teeming street crowds add both color and more atmosphere. The movie's commanding visuals owe a lot to the underrated Heisler. Too bad, however, the talented Frances Farmer is largely wasted in a brief, conventional role.Anyway, in my little book, the movie's a one-of-a-kind that rises above the ordinary B- feature or horror film, and should not be missed.

When it came to sex and violence, Paramount Pictures always had a perverse streak that went back to their 30s Pre-Code and horror films (THE STORY OF TEMPLE DRAKE, MURDER AT THE VANITIES, DR. JEKYLL & MR. HYDE, ISLAND OF LOST SOULDS, MURDERS IN THE ZOO, TERROR ABOARD, and MURDER BY THE CLOCK to name only a few) so it was only (un)natural that their groundbreaking adaptation of James M. Cain's DOUBLE INDEMNITY in 1944 would be instrumental in kicking off a cycle of dark films that would later come to be known as the Film Noir. But between the mid-30s and the mid-40s, the studio's unwholesome tendencies lay dormant for the most part with the exception of two 1941 films by Stuart Heisler that combined adult-themed scares with a "noir" sensibility. THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL (narrated by a prostitute coming out of the fog to tell her tale) mixed courtroom melodrama, murder, revenge, and the underworld with brain transplants and was the more outré of the two but the Southern Gothic AMONG THE LIVING's blend of murder and madness contained many visual elements that would soon appear in the burgeoning Film Noir. New Yorker John Raden (Albert Dekker) returns to the Southern mill town his father founded for the patriarch's funeral and long-buried family secrets soon threaten to rock his world. John learns from the family doctor (Harry Carey) that his twin, Paul (Albert Dekker), didn't die as a child but went insane (after their abusive father threw him against a wall for trying to protect his mother from another beating) and had been locked away in the cellar of the decaying family mansion for the past twenty-five years. Paul kills the old black servant that had been his keeper and, exhilarated by freedom, the child-like lunatic rents a room in town. He becomes involved with his landlady's gold-digging daughter (Susan Hayward) but another murder occurs and, with the townspeople in a grip of panic, mistaken identity erupts into vigilante violence...Character actor Albert Dekker got a rare chance to show his versatility in a dual role and he's given good support by veterans Harry Carey and Maude Eburne but it's Susan Hayward's dimestore vixen who walks away with the picture. Whether she's wheedling money out of Paul for a new dress or egging on a mob to rip a man apart, Susan's vivacious beauty and potent sex appeal is positively radiant and she steals every scene she's in. On the other hand, troubled Frances Farmer plays John's wife and has little to do other than to look beautiful and scream, both of which she does in a very sedated way. Albert Dekker effectively delineates the doppelgangers and there's no confusing the sane, urbane New Yorker with the scruffy lunatic who's method of murder is quite eerie. He strangles his victims and then places their hands over their ears because he can still hear his long-dead mother screaming. The atmospherics are appropriately dark for a social problem horror movie and there are many tableaux that predict the coming Film Noir. After Paul escapes from the dilapidated plantation house during a violent thunderstorm, he wanders through streets of tenements and cheap rooming houses amid newsboys and legless vagrants selling puppies until he stumbles into a nightmarish bistro where b-girls, brawny brawlers, and some furious jitterbugging bring on another bout of murderous madness in a vivid montage of sights and sounds. Besides the child abuse, there's also some social commentary going on in that the townspeople are clamoring for John to re-open the mill and desperate enough to do anything to get their hands on the $5,000 reward for the killer, turning ugly at the end in a way reminiscent of Fritz Lang's FURY five years before. A young and handsome Rod Cameron has an unbilled bit as a bar patron.