 |
| Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures |
Three-time Academy Award winning director William Wyler who
won for Mrs. Miniver, The Best Years of Our Lives and lastly Ben-Hur
is unquestionably one of the most iconic and important Old Hollywood
auteurs who ever lived with an astonishing track record spanning all the way
back to the silent era to his final film in 1970 The Liberation of L.B.
Jones. Quite possibly the most
accomplished and longest running Old Hollywood filmworker since Robert Wise or Ronald
Neame, Wyler (aside from the still debated directorial credit for Funny Girl)
never met a film project he didn’t master.
Such was the case of his 1955 adaptation of playwright
Joseph Hayes’ The Desperate Hours from 1954 which Hayes became the first
to write the novel, play and screenplay treatment of the same piece. Co-written by Jay Dratler, the story loosely
based on a true crime account is one of the very first true home invasion
thrillers as well as the first official black-and-white film shot in Paramount
Pictures’ new widescreen process VistaVision.
A tense thriller that reunited Wyler with leading man Fredric March of The
Best Years of Our Lives and maybe Humphrey Bogart’s most threatening role
since The Petrified Forest, the film is a realistic portrait of how an
ordinary family consisting of a married couple and their young daughter and son
might respond to such an unforeseen attack.
Daniel Hillard (Fredric March) lives in peace with his wife
and two children within an Indianapolis suburb when at random, escaped convicts
Glenn Griffin (Humphrey Bogart), his younger brother Hal (Dewey Martin) and Sam
Kobish (Robert Middleton) proceed to break into Hillard’s home intending to lay
low while impatiently awaiting the arrival of a stolen sum of money in the mail. What should be an overnight quick-and-easy
pit stop for the criminals turns into a protracted ordeal of endurance and
potential hostage crisis as Daniel gallantly locks horns with the sociopathic
Glenn. All the while, police forces led
by Deputy Sheriff Jesse Brad (Arthur Kennedy) begin closing in, invariably threatening
the safety of Daniel’s family members who will die if law enforcement officers
get too close to the house.
A sustained exercise in the survival genre thriller as film
noir, a crime drama about how nonviolent ordinary citizens respond to invasion
and assault, a sweat inducing chamber piece and above all a masterwork of
directing and acting, The Desperate Hours is a taut, unrelenting piece
of perfection featuring both Bogart and March in top form. Bogart is usually cast in the role of the
leading man, often romantic, so to see him stop being Mr. nice guy and sinking
his teeth into the role of a ruthless adversary with no qualms about pointing a
gun to a child’s head will come as a shock to some. Fredric March already established a rapport
with Wyler years earlier and here is seen as a vulnerable patriarch trying
desperately to play things Bogart’s way for his family’s safety.
Lensed exquisitely by pioneering filmmaker and Nightmare
Alley cinematographer Lee Garmes who won the Eastman Kodak award twice and
later became one of the first utilizers of videotape as a cinematographic tool
and scored brilliantly by recurring Wyler collaborator Gail Kubik, The
Desperate Hours takes full advantage of low-angled as well as high-angled
shots illustrating the tense newly-challenged power dynamics running through
the invaded household. Though bombastic
initially, the music quiets down some for a more realistic unfolding of events
including a final showdown largely done without music. Between the performances and audiovisual
compositions, The Desperate Hours is kind of perfectly constructed.
Sometime in 1990, Academy Award winning director Michael
Ciminio, still reeling from the public humiliation of Heaven’s Gate,
remade the film with Mickey Rourke and Anthony Hopkins to middling reviews. A few years later a comedy version of the
story entitled The Ref came to pass with Denis Leary playing the
criminal and Kevin Spacy being the besieged homeowner. Looking back on William Wyler’s film, the
film is quite daring for its day with references to boorish male behavior,
alcoholism, vandalism and the aforementioned blank pointing of a gun to a child’s
head.
A thriller which has lost none of its power to enthrall and
excite while giving audiences a glimpse into how they might respond to a
similar situation, The Desperate Hours now fully restored in 6K from the
original VistaVision negative comes from Arrow Video in a deluxe limited
edition blu-ray including a new audio interview with William Wyler’s daughter Catherine
speaking on her father’s legacy. Fans of
the home invasion thriller will find one of the very finest examples of the
subgenre here while William Wyler fans keen on the director’s oeuvre will find
another indefatigable masterpiece from the all-time great director.
--Andrew Kotwicki
