The Mugger (1958)

Franciscus's second feature film, The Mugger, was a police procedural based on an Ed McBain novel. A mugger is attacking women in McBain's unnamed city, stealing women's purses and slashing them on the cheek with his knife. The plot thickens when one of the victims, cab driver Franciscus's pregnant sister-in-law, ends up murdered.

Four Boys and a Gun (1957)

James Franciscus appeared in his first movie, "Four Boys and a Gun", while he was still in college, the summer after his junior year.

The movie is a better-than-average juvenile delinquent drama of the sort popular at the time. The plot: a runner for a bookie gets into trouble when he spends some of a day's take on a girlfriend instead of paying the boss. To come up with the money, he concocts a plan to rob a boxing arena with his three hoodlum friends. But the plan goes awry and a policeman is killed during the robbery. The D.A. must now determine which of the four boys fired the fatal shot - three of the boys will get life sentences and only the cop-killer will be sent to the electric chair, if they rat out the killer. Through a series of flashbacks each of the four boys' characters are explored and their motives revealed. The boys must choose among themselves who will take the rap - the actual shooter, the one with a family, the one who brought the gun, or the one who with the worst prospects in life if he is paroled?