I watched these two in sequence late last night on Turner’s Classic Movie channel and had seen neither of them before. Each was an eye-opener in its own way.
High Wall was like a Forties B-movie but just kept going on and on long after it was supposed to finish. I’d never seen a Curtis Bernhardt-directed film as unconvincing as this one during his Warners period. I’m giving the credited screenwriters (Sydney Boehm & Lester Cole, he of the Hollywood Ten) who took the blame for this the benefit of the doubt too, assuming it was “doctored” beyond their control — ditto playrights Clark & Foote — and weren’t able to take their names off it; ditto Bernhardt. The A-movie cast, led by Robert Taylor with Audrey “Hotsy Totsy” Totter
and Herbert Marshall, was a puzzle too. It wasn’t as if MGM had finished with Taylor, apparently their taken-for-granted, underpaid big star by reliable accounts. He was only 35 and still had Quo Vadis?, Ivanhoe and more color spectaculars to come years after this one. Maybe because film noir was “in” they thought they would shove him into one, no matter how bad. Suffice to say here that Taylor’s character was so poorly written, Audrey’s one so dumbly devoted to him and Dorothy Patrick so sluttish as his wife (and hysterically overplayed at that) that it was very hard not to root for evil villain Herbert Marshall as the only one at least intelligent enough to know what was good for him.
Taylor is a hero flyer come home from the war to long-strayed sexy wifie who’s playing up with well-to-do editor Herbert. Taylor’s in the middle of throttling her on the spot at Herbert’s place when he blacks out — and wakes to find her dead. He’s placed in an asylum where hot psychiatrist Totter (dressed to the nines from head to foot so you just know she’s a suppressed volcano about to blow) takes a shine to him, and evidently has instant designs on Taylor, taking his 6-year-old son into her home. Everyone but her thinks he’s faking to get out of prison time. After a brain operation he seems to improve — but threatens to kill girlfriend Audrey (but she likes it rough, much preferable to nice doctor Warner Anderson) unless she smuggles him out so he can stalk Herbert, moving his furniture around so he knows that he knows. Taylor stays up all night fully dressed back at the hospital expecting him to call around on a casual visit to try to buy him off — and when he does in the morning and straight out confesses to murdering his wife, whom Taylor didn’t care about anyway, Taylor leaps on him like a mad dog and beats the shit out of him in front of everyone and thus jeopardizes ever receiving custody of his son. He’s dragged off Herbert and is hauled away foaming at the mouth, getting just one of the really stupid scenes over and done with.
Still, on escaping yet again to Herbert’s house — with seemingly the city’s entire police force out after the mad murderer Taylor — Audrey is the one who tracks him down. They somehow trick Herbert into taking sodium pentathol (truth serum) — can’t remember how this bit is contrived, thankfully — and the next we see is Taylor, the shoot-on-sight crim, interrogating Herbert and getting a full confession out of him conveniently as the police detectives and DA’s assistants have all arrived round at Herbert’s place just on cue, watching placidly.
An interesting cameo is by Elizabeth Risdon, an English superstar in the early days of silents, who plays Roberts longsuffering mom.
If this is a boy’s cops-and-robbers idea of a thriller of the period, then three years later we have an amazingly modern thriller, a triumph written and directed by young Richard Brooks on debut. If Crisis seems superficially like one of those Alfred Hitchcock thrillers where Cary Grant (or James Stewart) gets caught in an inescapable jam and spends the rest of the movie getting out of it, then it is done with an aura of overwhelming realism without any of the silly Hitchcock tricks or contrived coincidences — save for the very last scene.
Cary Grant, 46 at the time, is a neurosurgeon on vacation with wife lovely Paula Raymond (The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms!, 1953), 25, in an Ibero-American country with a revolution about to blow. They are kidnapped by government police led by colonel Antonio Moreno (Latin lover from Hollywood silents) and taken to the palace of el presidente Jose Ferrer,
acting everyone else off the screen, who will die of his brain tumor if not saved by Cary. On hand to assist are US ambassador Leon Ames and nice doctor Ramon Novarro (Latin lover from Hollywood silents). But in the meantime Paula is re-kidnapped by revolutionary leader Gilbert Roland (Latin lover from Hollywood silents) with the threat that she will not survive if el presidente does survive. Jose’s operation does succeed and so does the revolution… Guess what happens next! Will anyone survive the machinations of oh-so-courteous but coldly, calculatingly evil Mrs Presidente Signe Hasso?
Unbelievably, the cops and robbers get a higher rating at the International Movie Database site than the intelligently executed, believable thriller.
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