Cay Forester and Door-to-Door Maniac
by Susan King
“B” movie actress Cay Forester never received the credit she deserved. Literally. Check out her filmography and you’ll see she’s listed as “uncredited” for most of the films she did including 1944’s “San Fernando Valley,” the 1945 serial “Brenda Starr, Reporter,” 1947’s “Smash-Up, the Story of a Woman,” and 1974’s “Airport 1975.” Though best remember as Sue, the married blonde bombshell who tries to tempt Edmund O’Brien in 1950’s memorable film noir “D.O.A.,” Forester isn’t even listed in the opening credits.
The Stockton, California native born in 1921 as Mila Patricia Crosby may have seen the writing on the wall as far as her career and retired from the screen in 1950 when she married investment banker, Ludlow Flower, Jr., and became a mother. When she returned to acting in 1961 in the noir thriller “Five Minutes to Live,” which marked the acting debut of Johnny Cash,” Forester not only starred opposite the country legend, but she also wrote the script. Her husband produced the poorly received movie, and the film disappeared soon after release. Five years later, American International Pictures added a rape scene and re-released it as “Door-to-Door Maniac.”
“When the door bell rings…Don’t answer!” proclaimed the poster’s tagline. “It could be the “Door-to-Door Maniac!”
Film Masters is releasing the Blu-Ray of “Door-To-Door Maniac” from a 4K scan from original 35MM archival elements — the double bill disc also features the 1963 rarity, “Right Hand of the Devil.”
It’s wonderfully delicious wallow for fans of bad movies.
Cash plays hardened criminal Johnny Cabot, who has fled to the West Coast as a wanted man due to a robbery gone wrong, ending in a fatal shoot out in New Jersey. He teams up with sleazy crook (“Alice”’s Vic Tayback with hair!) and they plot to rob a local bank of $75,000. Tayback’s Fred has Johnny hold Nancy, the society-climbing wife (Forester) of a bank executive (Donald Woods) Ken, hostage in their house while he forces the banker to give him the money or Nancy will die. The twist? The bank executive had already planned to leave his wife and head to Las Vegas with his mistress (Pamela Mason), so he’s not in any hurry to save his wife. Also featured in the cast is future Oscar-winner director Ron Howard as their young son.
Bill Karn, of 1960’s “Ma Barker’s Killer Brood” fame, directed the film that had a $100,000 budget with Cash making a paltry $700 a week. At one point, the production ran out of money; Cash ponied up some $20,000 to keep the movie going. He also wrote and performs the title tune.
The singer, who, according to Robert Hilburn’s biography on Cash, had a twenty a day pill addiction at the time, is over the top as the hyped-up hep cat guitar-playing crazed killer. But he does utter some memorably “Mystery Science Theatre” deliciously bad lines. When Johnny takes Nancy to her bedroom and she quickly tries to make the bed, he snarls “I like a messy bed… I like a broad to look smart.”
In January 1961, veteran entertainment reporter Joe Hyams interviewed Forester about the movie which had just wrapped production the previous month. The journalist only refers to her once as Cay Forester preferring to call her Mrs. Ludlow Flower “former actress turned clubwoman, society hostess and chairman of numerous community fund-raising projects” who related to the journalist that over a breakfast one morning she told her husband she wanted to write a script. “Mrs. Flower went to her typewriter and by dinner time she had written some scenes of a movie about a clubwoman like herself being held hostage…For the next six months, Mrs. Flower worked on the screenplay.”
Forester mentioned before she decided to try her hand at screenwriting, she took lessons with a summer acting coach with the illustrious Sanford Meisner. “I learned some important things about conflict, and characterization,” she told Hyams. “Most important, I learned to write about things I know about.”
Cash would later say that doing the movie was a “career misstep. ‘I shouldn’t have done it. “My leadin’ lady was the producer’s wife.” He would only do one more narrative feature, 1971’s “The Gunfighter.”
As for Forester, she and Flower would divorce in 1967; that same year she appeared at the then Huntington Hartford Theatre in Hollywood in the play “The Right Honorable Gentleman.” One reviewer singled out Forester’s performance for all the wrong reasons declaring she was “appalling amateurish. She seemed as out-of-place among the professionals…”
She continued to appear in movies including Otto Preminger’s 1962 political drama “Advice and Consent” and guest on TV series such as “Family Affair,” “Adam-12,” and “Mannix.” Her last film was 1976’s “Two-Minute Warning” under the name Kate Archer.
Forester died of pneumonia in 2005 Las Vegas at the age of 83. Surviving her were her three daughters, five grandchildren and five great grandchildren.
Susan King was a film/TV/theater writer at the Los Angeles Times for 26 years specializing in Classic Hollywood.
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