The Truly Obscure: John Sledge

John Sledge is the unacknowledged King of New Orleans Noir! Biographical information on him has not been possible to find so far. All we have are his credits. His best-known film (not saying much) is New Orleans after Dark (1958, sometimes listed 1957) (of which more below).

The Invisible Avenger (1958) (which has been available on DVD from Alpha Video) is described thus at FilmsandTV.com:

“The popular radio program The Shadow is brought to the screen with Richard Derr in the role of superdetective Lamont Cranston/The Shadow who can "cloud men`s minds" so that he is invisible. This is an unsold pilot for a TV series that did not spawn the series--partly because of the low budget and poor production values. Cranston investigates the murder of a Latin American dictator in New Orleans. It turns out that the dictator faked his murder in order to bring the true leader out in the open so he could be killed. Rereleased four years later as Bourbon Street Shadows with additional material added.”

The famous cinematographer James Wong Howe, whose only other theatrical feature directing credit is the Harlem Globetrotters movie Go, Man, Go! (1954) (like I said, you take what you can get), is listed as co-director, as is Ben Parker.

Parker is an interesting case in his own right. He has four feature directing credits. The other three are A Modern Marriage (1950, co-directed with Paul Landres, re-released as Frigid Wife), one of those B edu-shockers (“A psychiatrist tries to help a newlywed wife, who is depressed and suicidal over her sexual problems”); Teen-Age Strangler (1964), which was riffed on MST3K; and The Shepherd of the Hills (1964), based on a turn-of-the-century Christian novel by Harold Bell Wright and starring the aging Richard Arlen, who that same year made the somewhat less doctrinal Sex and the College Girl, which Parker produced.

Reading the credits of some of these minor figures, you see that career coherence was not their strong suit.

But John Sledge stayed true to New Orleans. He had a hand in a couple of other syndicated TV projects. One was N.O.P.D. (1956), starring Jack Webb’s buddy Stacy Harris, who was also in New Orleans Uncensored (1955) for William Castle (there’s your New Orleans connection again), and Louis Sirgo. The film New Orleans after Dark uses the same actors and characters and was either compiled from the TV episodes, or made as part of the same effort. The material does sound a little sleazy for TV (brutalized burlesque dancers and such). The location filming was a selling point: “Filmed in the sin spots where it happened!” was a tag-line on the film’s poster.

There is an extended treatment of this film in Will Straw’s essay “Urban Confidential: The Lurid City of the 1950s,” in the volume The Cinematic City edited by David B. Clarke. I like the essay’s opening line: “The first few minutes of New Orleans after Dark (1957) offer one of the most glaringly inept opening sequences in the American cinema of the 1950s.” Take it away, Sledge!

The other Sledge TV project was The Tracer (1957) with James Chandler, later a regular on Bourbon Street Beat (I rest my New Orleans case). This was a bit along the lines of The Millionaire (which pre-dated it by two years): “From the case files of the "Tracers Company"… [investigator] Reagan locates the lost heirs and missing beneficiaries for the family wills/rewards left to them.” (IMDB)

The last credit for Sledge and his frequent writer Frank Phares was Four for the Morgue (1963), which was definitely a paste-up of N.O.P.D. material:

“Episodic detective drama starring Harris and Sirgo as New Orleans sleuths who investigate a variety of crimes. They clear the name of a patrolman accused of murdering a purse-stealing young socialite, solve the murder of a bank robber whose body is found in a swamp, capture a murderous hitchhiker, and catch the murderer of a cab driver's wife and small dog.” (TVGuide.com)

Why Sledge was still re-cycling this material some seven years after launching N.O.P.D. is a little perplexing; it must have looked awfully dated in 1963. But then, he had re-cycled the Invisible Avenger material as Bourbon Street Shadows in 1962; he was clearly into re-cycling.

There is undoubtedly a lengthier piece to be written on Sledge by a New Orleans-based writer who could ferret out more facts. Sledge was a regional film-maker before regional film-making formed any kind of movement, which makes him a figure of interest.