Pat Boone Noir Watch: The Yellow Canary (1963)

Watched:  09/08/2026

Format:  TCM Noir Alley

Viewing:  First

Director:  Buzz Kulik

All I knew was that The Yellow Canary (1963) starred Pat Boone and Barbara Eden, too people I could not imagine paired, let alone in a noir film.

From the intro and outro, my takeaway was that Eddie Muller had gotten involved with preserving this movie because it seemed so unlikely.  Good-guy singer and sometimes actor Pat Boone had agreed to play a philandering, jack-ass pop star (a Bizarro-world version of himself) who is married to Barbara Eden and somehow (against all imaginable odds, and my basic understanding of the world) finds that boring.  

The same night Eden asks him for a divorce, they find that their son has been kidnapped!

Enter Jack Klugman as The Cop, and he's just Klugging it up all over the place.  Klugman is basically there to try and talk sense about why the police have procedures for a ransom situation.  

But, of course, our hero keeps just running off and doing things.

This is not a great movie.  And the score is just f-ing bizarre.  It's like swinging jazzy stuff you half expect for a movie about a beach party.  It completely undercuts everything that's happening, and you expect Barbara Eden to start shimmying, which, tragically, does not happen.

But like so much else with this movie, it's more interesting *who* did it than what's in the movie.  The composer is Kenyon Hopkins, who also scored The Hustler and other major pictures.  

The movie also has movie "that guy" Jesse White, the guy who played Sgt. Schulz as well as Joe Turkel from Blade Runner.  Somehow I've seen like 4 Joe Turkel movies.

By the way - the screenplay?  By Rod Serling.

Did I like this movie?  No.  But I'm not sure anyone expected you to.  Sometimes something is just weird enough that you think it should continue to exist, and that's this movie.  

Also, look who helped make the restoration a reality:

yes, I took a picture of my TV.  You can see my porch reflected through the window.

And if Jello Biafra wants this movie to exist, how wrong can we be to watch it?

Was Pat Boone good in this?  Was he ready to play a cigar-chomping ladies-man?  No.  But everyone around him is good.  Eden is very good indeed.  

It's just not... a... good movie.

Anyhoo... here's Barabra Eden in the movie.