William Wyler (1955)
In this exciting, increasingly gruelling crime drama, three escaped convicts occupy a middle-class family home in suburban Indianapolis, holding the family hostage. The hours of the title mount up – the gang means to leave as soon as money arrives to fund their getaway but the plan goes wrong – yet the action never drags. William Wyler’s film, which runs 113 minutes, doesn’t feel a moment too long.
Working with a screenplay by Joseph Hayes (adapted from his own novel and subsequent stage play), Wyler deftly outlines the household, finishing breakfast at the start of just-another-day – white-collar worker Dan Hilliard (Fredric March), his homemaker wife Eleanor (Martha Scott), their twentyish daughter Cindy (Mary Murphy) and much younger son Ralph (Richard Eyer), who’s nevertheless old enough to object to being called Ralphie and to resist kissing his dad goodbye as he leaves for school. In her father’s eyes, Cindy is too young to be thinking of marriage; as far as she’s concerned, the only snag is that Chuck Wright, an attorney in the law firm where she works, hasn’t popped the question yet. Once Dan and Cindy have driven off to the city, Ellie Hilliard starts her housework. She has the radio on. A news report of the prison break is an economical means of imparting information about the escapees and showing how far removed their world is from that of Mrs Hilliard, oblivious to what the radio newsreader is telling her. Until the convicts ring her doorbell.
The three criminals are Glenn Griffin (Humphrey Bogart), his kid brother Hal (Dewey Martin) and their accomplice Simon Kobish (Robert Middleton). Four years ago, the elder Griffin shot and killed a policeman in the Indianapolis area. Taking Glenn into custody, Deputy Sheriff Jesse Bard broke his jaw. It’s Bard (Arthur Kennedy) who now organises a state-wide manhunt for the Griffin brothers and Kobish. Glenn calls his girlfriend in Pittsburgh, giving her the Hilliards’ address and instructing her to drive over post haste with money (the Hilliards don’t keep much cash in the house). She’s expected by midnight; when she’s pulled over for a traffic violation, the trio’s departure is seriously delayed. Events in the meantime enable Bard and his team to pinpoint the fugitives’ hideout.
Not all the family is housebound for the entire duration of their ordeal – Glenn has his reasons for letting Cindy go on a date with Chuck (Gig Young) that evening and Dan return to the office the following morning. The well-plotted screenplay also features other visits to the house and excursions outside it, all of them effective. Ralph’s teacher (Beverly Garland), concerned by his absence from school, pays a call. When Hal Griffin eventually decides to walk out on his brother, he hijacks a car whose terrified driver (Joe Flynn) is relieved to be left standing on the roadside as Hal drives off alone. Another, more pivotal hijack ends grimly. Refuse collector George Patterson (Walter Baldwin) arrives at the house on his regular round. There’s an unfamiliar vehicle in the garage where the refuse is stored and he looks curiously at the number plate. (A shot through the kitchen window, of the convicts watching him discover the truck they’ve stolen, is among the highlights of Lee Garmes’s stealthy camerawork.) Patterson is on screen only a few minutes but it’s long enough to make his murder, at the hands of Kobish, upsetting.
Hayes’s dialogue is consistently excellent – not only Glenn’s hardboiled one-liners (‘Crying department’s upstairs, lady’, ‘Do as I say, and junior gets to vote’) but also the more serious pronouncements (in the climax, when Dan draws a gun on Glenn and the latter scoffs, ‘You ain’t got it in you, Pop’, the man of the house replies, ‘I got it in me: you put it there’). Wyler keeps illustrating the normal life that continues beyond the confines of the Hilliards’ home – their commuter neighbours returning in the evening, the office routines in Dan’s workplace where his uncharacteristic brusque urgency worries his secretary (Helen Kleeb). Wyler generates suspense even in making clear that the escaped criminals are on the front page of the local newspaper: the papers are usually folded so that only half the headline is legible. The extent of the action in the outside world pushes credibility to the limit but the film’s momentum pushes doubts on this score to the back of your mind.
I’m guessing that the scenes outdoors are one major difference between The Desperate Hours as a play and a film. A certain difference is the age of Glenn Griffin, a twenty-five-year-old in the Broadway version, where Paul Newman played the role. (Karl Malden was the paterfamilias.) Although it’s not quite impossible to accept Humphrey Bogart and Dewey Martin (twenty-four years Bogart’s junior) as brothers, the casting necessarily reshapes Glenn from young hoodlum into embittered old lag. This works well, though – Bogart more than looks the part. He was terminally ill at the time he made The Desperate Hours (his penultimate film). His evident frailty gives the villain of the piece a persistent vulnerability.
Bogart is admirably partnered by the great Fredric March, who captures the mixture of determination to protect his family, fear and resourcefulness that drives his character. March crucially suggests a mind always alert to what needs to be done and said (and not said) – a quality that Glenn Griffin sees, and respects, in Dan Hilliard from an early stage. As candid, plucky Ralph, ten-year-old Richard Eyer at first seems a thoroughly familiar all-American-boy-in-a-hostage-situation – snub-nosed kin to the kid in the previous year’s Suddenly. As the film goes on, and Ralph begins to see that his father’s grace under pressure may serve better than recklessness, Eyer becomes more nuanced. (In the small role of Ralph’s sparky playmate, Louis Lettieri scores a bullseye with each one of his few lines.) On the distaff side of the family, Martha Scott and Mary Murphy are thoroughly unsurprising but they do enough to dramatise a contrast at the heart of the film – between the Hilliard women’s house-proud fragrance and the coarse disorder of their unwanted guests.
Needless to say, IMDb and Wikipedia both describe The Desperate Hours as a film noir. On the face of it (the movie’s look and atmosphere), this seems like another example of the term’s elastic use to cover any black-and-white Hollywood picture of the early post-war era in which crime (or even legal misbehaviour) plays a major part. Yet the connection film historians have made between American noir and Cold War anxieties gives credibility to the IMDb/Wikipedia definition: the invasion of the Hilliards’ home by an alien force is a dominant element of Wyler’s movie. The convicts damage or destroy decor in vengeful anger or, occasionally, through sheer clumsiness. The film’s attitude towards them borders on the offensively snooty but it’s impressively thoroughgoing.
Robert Middleton’s Neanderthal Kobish is the most visceral aspect of this – he’s grossly overweight, swarthy, probably smelly, definitely not house trained. He doesn’t need to manhandle either of the women; his very physical proximity to them verges on violation. ‘My wife’s not your servant,’ Dan protests at an early stage; it’s one of his few unwise remarks to Glenn Griffin, who amusedly replies, ‘I always wanted a servant’ and proceeds to make the most of his opportunity. When his teacup’s empty, he demands a refill by striking a spoon insistently against the china; Ellie arrives to collect his cup and he deposits a cigar butt in it. Glenn’s attitude backfires, however, when the Hilliards’ way of life starts to appeal to Hal. ‘You taught me everything …,’ he tells his elder brother, ‘except how to live in a house like this’.
Even parts of The Desperate Hours that seem unpromising pay off eventually. For a while, the police action feels mechanical beside the goings-on chez Hilliard but livens up once Griffin’s girl is caught speeding and as Bard starts to close in on the gang’s whereabouts. Gig Young looks to have a thankless task playing Chuck Wright; the script repeatedly evades the issue of what he and Cindy talk about when they’re out together, and of why Chuck doesn’t presses for an explanation of her tense, taciturn manner. But Young, one of the finest supporting actors of his Hollywood generation, makes bricks out of straw – even the way he adjusts the armrest between the front seats of Chuck’s car is expressive. By the end of the film, Cindy’s suitor has earned his stripes and won her father’s confidence – in the final shot, with the baddies vanquished and the Hilliards free to resume being a happy family, Dan beckons to Chuck to join them inside the house. Gig Young has earned his stripes too.
24 May 2021
