New Picture

The Desperate Hours (Paramount) is a thriller that jabs so shrewdly and sharply at sensibility that the moviegoer's eye might feel that it has not so much been entertained as used for a pincushion. But to melodrama fans, it may prove one of the most pleasurably prostrating evenings ever spent in a movie house.

The picture, written by Joseph Hayes, who has also compounded his felony into a hit play on Broadway, is based on his bestselling novel of the same name. It tells the story of an Indianapolis family held prisoner in its own home by three escaped convicts who are ready to do anything, and the worse the better, to avoid capture. The leader of the gang (Humphrey Bogart) is a sallow old paranoid with nothing to lose but his worst enemy, the cop (Arthur Kennedy) who put him away. Bogart's younger brother (Dewey Martin) is a mixed-up little slumbunny with hot pants and cold feet. The third con (Robert Middleton) is a 260-lb. flitch of muscle directed by the brain of a badly brought-up six-year-old.

The gang moves in, spreads out. In one sudden, sickening instant they have gone through the pleasant, middle-class house like a filthy remark through a roomful of friends; the change in the air is so sharp it can almost be smelled. The householder (Fredric March), a middle-aged department-store executive, gets home from work to find Bogart pointing a gun at the head of his wife (Martha Scott). His teen-age daughter (Mary Murphy) and ten-year-old son (Richard Ever) are held captive, too. "You pull anything," Bogart purrs, "I'll let you sit and watch me kick the kid's face in."

And so the long, tense duel begins, wit to wit and will across will, between the embattled householder and the leering principle of unreason that fists in his refrigerator and lords it on his hearth. Worse still, March soon realizes that the law is no less his enemy than the outlaw; for if the police find out where the criminals are hiding, they are sure to come after them, and when they do, Bogart & Co., as promised, will make sure that March and family die first. The man of the house stands alone, and if he falls, his family falls with him. What to do ?

"Live it normal," Bogart suggests, and normal they all try desperately to make it look. Mother goes shopping as usual, answers the phone and the door, chats prosily with teacher when she comes to see if Richard, who has stayed home "sick" from school, is feeling any better. Father and daughter go to work in the morning, and in the evening daughter dates her young lawyer (Gig Young). But people make mistakes. Little Richard writes a warning to teacher in his copybook, and father intercepts it only just in time. Another time March manages, by a brilliant stroke of opportunity, to lock two of the brutes out of the house and overpower a third. He leaps to the phone--only to hear his wife cry out that Bogart has got the boy, who had chosen that moment for an attempt to sneak out the window and run for help. Worst of all, the rubbish man starts snooping around--and finds his own grave.

One Broadway critic called the play "an almost perfect melodrama." The movie lacks a few of the psychological grace notes of the play, but Author Hayes has written a meller with the coiling continuity of a whiplash, and a savage snapper at the end of it. Producer-Director William Wyler has the capacity to see the whole of a motion picture in one flash across the private screen of imagination; and into this sense of the whole he can interpolate ornament--all kinds of human dado and humoristic acanthus--with a skill that gives spontaneity to the grand design without collapsing its tension. Does the little boy refuse to drink his milk? Just let Bogart side with him against his parents, and he downs the whole glass in a gulp.

In The Desperate Hours, Director Wyler has subordinated his actors with unusual severity to the pace of the plot, and most of them have taken to the rein like the thoroughbreds they are. Bogart gives a piteously horrible impression of the essential criminal, the man who has to take because he is too weak to give. And Richard Ever, as the boy, is a regular little darb. Fredric March, by the dignity of his performance, lends to the father's role a sense of legendary size that reminds a moviegoer--in a picture that might otherwise have had high muzzle velocity but slight penetration--that he is witnessing not only an animated newspaper headline, but also a plain parable about human rights and the majesty of the patriarchal principle, which, from the day of the cave to the advent of the split-level, has kept the wolf from the door.

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