It was one of Lord's last two theatrical features before he got caught up in Hawaii Five-O's long run. The other is The Counterfeit Killer, another thriller also directed by an expatriate who came to specialize in American episodic television, the Pole Joseph Lejtes. (Both Lejtes and Hellstrom directed episodes of Bonanza.) It was one of the first writing credits of the young Steven Bochco, and apparently has a good jazzy score by Quincy Jones. (Jones's first composing credit on a film was, wouldn't you know, a Swedish movie, Arne Sucksdorff's Pojken i tradet in 1961.)
Lord has some pretty darned obscure noir(-ish) films in his portfolio: Lewis Seiler's The True Story of Lynn Stuart (1958),
Richard Thorpe's Tip on a Dead Jockey (1957),
Jack Glenn's Cry Murder (1950),
and Edward J. Montagne's Project X (1949), described in the IMDB as follows:
The New York-filmed production opens with a discourse on Communist infiltration into American colleges, and moves on to a series of dialogue exchanges in a night club, an apartment, a barber shop and some offices. A young physicist is being blackmailed, by a friend, into stealing a secret atomic energy plan.
Montagne went on to direct the marginally better-known films The Tattooed Stranger (Lord is in that one, too, but uncredited) and The Man with My Face.
POSTSCRIPT: Don Malcolm at The Blackboard regaled me with further "scuttlebutt over a beer" details about Gunnar Hellstrom's life in Hollywood, which he remembered from his own boyhood there. Don described the young Hellstrom as a heartthrob type, and I looked up a picture of him as a youth - he was striking-looking.
His very first screen credit was a bit in a Swedish noir called While the City Sleeps (1950) from an Ingmar Bergman treatment. He later directed and starrred in a noir of his own, Nattbarn (Night Children) (1956), with Harriet Andersson.
As he aged into his 30s and 40s, Hellstrom's build became beefier and with his Nord-Euro look he was perfect for small parts as German army officers, that sort of thing. He played one in The Time Tunnel episode "The Ghost of Nero" - Hellstrom is on the right in the picture below.
Of particular interest to me, he acted for Robert Altman at least twice, in a first-season Combat! episode "I Swear By Apollo," and in an hour-long pilot called "Walk in the Sky" that aired on CBS in the summer of 1968. According to Patrick McGilligan's Altman biography,
People always congregated at Altman's new offices in Westwood, in those days called either Red Carpet Productions or simply Westwood Productions. The Swedish director Gunnar Hellstrom might be there, and Ida Lupino and Howard Duff, who had encouraged Altman back in the 1950s, or actors like Robert Ridgeley or Michael Murphy who seemed to feed off Altman's energy.
The offices led out to a little courtyard, with two rooms downstairs, one upstairs for screenings. At various times the office had a pool table and a barbershop chair and pinball machines, strange items for a production office in those days, though nowadays de rigeur. There were always people coming and going, cheese and crackers out on the table, with screenings of Altman's television episodes, his Calvin [industrial] films, and his other independent films at night. All very relaxed and informal, all very "family."
I love the way that McGilligan makes you feel the atmosphere of it. (He really ought to update his account, which as it stands, concludes in the early Nineties, to include Altman's miraculous "third act.") Altman was a partier, which would have been conducive to Hellstrom's own high spirits.
Hellstrom also acted under Richard C. Sarafian, who like Reza Badiyi was a sometimes-uneasy Altman protege, in the short-lived war series Jericho, and under Jack Webb in a two-part piece called "Code Name: Christopher" for G.E. True ("based on stories from True magazine") in 1962.
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