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Wyler's The Desperate Hours is the model, thus the foundation for J. Lee Thompson's later Charles Bronson vehicles. "A hell of a note, isn't it? Either we have too many laws or not enough." Out of prison and out for blood, "a shocking degenerate" (Robert Mitchum) circling the attorney (Gregory Peck) who testified against him. He wears a panama hat and wields an oversized cigar, knows just how far to push things after studying law behind bars, relishes what he's got in mind for his foe's wife (Polly Bergen) and daughter (Lori Martin). "You sweatin' a little, huh, counselor?" He batters a local pickup (Barrie Chase) just as a taste of things to come, she leaves town petrified by fright. The private detective (Telly Savalas) comes up empty-handed, his advice simmers within the upstanding citizen: "A type like that is an animal, so you've got to fight him like an animal." Martin Balsam and Bernard Herrmann are brought from Psycho, the aim is to strip Hitchcock of everything but his gloating grip on the audience. Demon hepcat versus respectable square and his sitcom family, no contest, Mitchum's somnolent malevolence burns holes in Peck's monolithic rectitude, puffing out an obscenely brawny chest while his co-star stoops under the weight of threatened virtue. "No war of nerves" but a pressure-cooker of terror, plus a clammy snapshot of the South through a tenebrous English eye. Back into the primordial slime for the showdown, the beast snuffs out a deputy (he gives the corpse a chummy pat as it sinks into the swamp) and smears egg yolk over his trembling prey. "You just put the law in my hands, and I'm gonna break your heart with it." Scorsese has the official remake, Siegel (Dirty Harry) and Peckinpah (Straw Dogs) the unofficial ones. Cinematography by Sam Leavitt. With Jack Kruschen, Page Slattery, Paul Comi, and Will Wright. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |