The Desperate Hours
(1955) brought the escaped convict genre to suburbia. That’s where everyone
else was headed in the 1950s, and the house in the neighborhood is as much a
character in this film as the three outlaws and the family they terrorize.
In The Desperate Hours,
Humphrey Bogart plays the lead bad guy in his second-to-last film and the very
last bad guy role he was to play in movies. He shows he’s still got it.
Dewey Martin plays his younger brother who has broken out of
prison with him. The third member of their gang is played by Robert Middleton,
who is arguably the most frightening member of the trio.
The movie begins with an audience perspective shot as we
move down a suburban subdivision. There are lawns and trees, children, a dog or
two, people walking on sidewalks. It is deceptively peaceful. The camera moves
very quickly to one particular home on the block. If the house looks familiar
to you from the outside that’s because two years later, Beaver Cleaver lived
here. The television sitcom Leave It to Beaver
(1957-1963) used this exterior for the Cleaver home.
Fredric March is the head of the clan, doting father and
husband and executive, who works “downtown,” a place which with the settlement
of suburbia has become more distant and vaguer to us.
Martha Scott is his wife; Mary Murphy is his grown daughter;
and the wonderful Richard Eyer, who as we’ve seen was such a standout in films here like Friendly Persuasion (1956) and here in Slander (1957), plays his young
son.
Though we see the family gathered together for a cheerful,
if rushed, breakfast, it is not all idyllic on the home front. Fredric March
does not approve of his daughter’s latest boyfriend, a hotshot young lawyer
played by Gig Young. She is rebellious and they argue in the car when he drives
her to work “downtown.”
Young Richard no longer wants to kiss his father goodbye
when he leaves for school; he’s too man for that now and he does want to does
not want to be known by a nickname anymore. He’s an All-American boy, pretty
much goes his own way and his sudden streak of independence, while cute in this
scene, is going to prove to be a greater problem later on when he tries to
rebel against their captors.
The story was written by Joseph Hayes from his novel and his
original script which was performed on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre
from February to August 1955, the film’s release year. For some years
thereafter, it was a popular summer theatre play and the two-level set which
was required to tell the story of showing the family in different rooms with
the bad guys was always a challenge and always a hit on stage. We take things
for granted like a two-story house in the movies, but on stage we appreciate
more the architectural skill it takes to build and to work on a two-level open
set.
The Broadway version was directed by actor and director
Robert Montgomery. Karl Malden played Fredric March’s role as the suburban
husband and father, and Paul Newman played the Humphrey Bogart role. We can
imagine that the younger gangster in the mid-1950s might have carried a more
sinister suspense story because the brothers would have been contemporaries and
because they might have appeared more violent and impetuous.
Though Bogart is a generation older than his brother played
by Dewey Martin, we can accept them as brothers and accept that Bogart, even
though famed for playing dangerous criminals, serves a different function in
the screen version. His is rather like a parallel to Fredric March, than to his
partner younger brother. Like March, he
is the head of his family, or his gang, and he sometimes has trouble keeping
them in line. Fredric March bristles at his daughter’s romance, believing her
to still be a kid. Humphrey Bogart is stumped when later in the film his
brother rebels not just against his authority but against the whole way of life
in which his big brother has raised him.
Bogart and his gang have chosen this house at random, which
is certainly an eerie aspect about the story, it could have been any home—maybe
even yours. Bogart’s reason for choosing this house was that Richard Eyer has
left his bicycle on the front lawn. Bogart knows he would be able to make the
family more fearful and more easily cooperative if they have to protect
children. This tells us that he has some experience and logic in his craft, and
also that he would prefer not to have any trouble if he could avoid it. He
intends to hole up here until he can arrange for a former girlfriend to bring
them money to escape. But he also wants to
go after the deputy sheriff responsible for putting him in prison.
Arthur Kennedy plays the deputy sheriff, who is the only one
among the police officials to take the news of the jailbreak seriously, feeling
certain that Humphrey Bogart is coming straight for him. He is not so paranoid
as he is analytical, just as logical as Bogart or Fredric March is in this
scenario. There is an attempt to turn the story into more or less a triangle to
include the efforts of the police to trace Bogart’s whereabouts. This is obviously
not something that would have been easily done on stage where the whole story
was pretty much set in the home.
Note Bogart’s disgust when he sees that March, whom he
resents for his middle-class respectability, has only $800 in his
bankbook. In that era, it would have represented
probably something like three or more months’ wages saved. That may not be terrific in Bogart’s eyes—he’s
after all the marbles—but today when it is estimated that only about 18 percent
of Americans have three-to-five months’ savings in the bank, then this family
is doing okay.
The movie also gives us a lot of familiar faces to pick out
in the crowd, Ray Teal as the state police detective, Alan Reed (Fred Flintstone)
is another officer, Ray Collins, Simon Oakland will also play police officials,
Whit Bissell plays a pensive and intellectual FBI agent. Beverly Garland plays
the teacher who drops by and in front of whom March must pretend to be bringing
home drinking buddies to cover for her seeing the bad guys. Joe Flynn plays a
panicky motorist taken hostage, and poor Walter Baldwin plays the junkman in
the greatest danger of all of them.
Shortly after father and daughter leave for work, and Junior’s
off to school, mom Martha Scott begins her housecleaning. She brings along a
portable radio into every room to listen to music and, of course, to give us
the opportunity to hear the news bulletins about the escaped convicts. Later on
in the movie, Humphrey Bogart will smash the radio in a fit of anger.
It is interesting that even though this film was released in
1955, we see no television set in the home. It is more than likely that by the
mid-1950s, a middle-class home such as this would have a television. I’m not
sure why they don’t include one, either because it didn’t figure into the plot,
or because the film industry was still chafing with resentment over its new
competitor and didn’t want to acknowledge its existence? Though Fredric March drives an older model
car, the movie is not set in the late 1940s—Gig Young’s flashy sportscar alone
tells us that.
We might think today that the TV would be a better place
than the radio for news bulletins, but this was long before 24-hour news and
also it was an era where news broadcasts were infrequent and brief. There were
usually only one or two news programs lasting all of about 15 minutes from the
6 o’clock to the 7:30 time frame in the morning, and it was much the same in
the early evening from 6 o’clock to about 7:30. We might have one or two news
programs 15 minutes in duration. Television news did not really come of age
until the 1960s, and much of that, sadly, was launched in the aftermath of the
Kennedy assassination. Newspapers were still king of the news--even of bulletins, with the ability to produce "extras" several times a day.
Robert Middleton, the large hulking Neanderthal of the bad
guys with one presumes the IQ of a child, plays with Richard Eyer’s toys in his
room and break some of them in frustration when he smacks his head while
looking out the window. He fumbles with
a toy bank that looks like a little safe, and he cannot open it. At one point
he takes a toy gun and blasts it around the house until Humphrey Bogart tells
him knock it off. In one scene—one of director William Wyler’s touches, while Bogart
is terrorizing Martha Scott in the foreground, in the background we see
Middleton drinking from a milk bottle and spilling it down his chest (just as
the boy will do later). These images of
the buffoon are only half-comic. They
also point to Middleton’s mental instability, which is the most dangerous thing
about him. These fellows had been in prison, we don’t know for how long, but
it’s possible that television would have been a complete novelty to them. I
imagine if Robert Middleton’s character was so enthralled by Richard Eyer’s
toys, then he might have enjoyed CaptainVideo or Hopalong Cassidy.
Bogart snidely says of Middleton to Martha Scott, “Crude, ain’t
he?”
Bogart is commanding in his sneering, angry role, indeed, it
is a role he has played many times. There is stubble on his face and over the
phone he calls his gun moll “Doll,” like a man from another era, and he is
supposed to be. He has no place in modern society.
His younger brother, Dewey Martin, feels this more acutely
than Bogey. He is more wide-eyed at the appearance of the house, and at the
nubile young daughter. At first, when he enters the daughter’s bedroom while
she is at work and sees her canopy bed, he touches the frills on the canopy and
brushes his face seductively on them. It
is an image which causes us to think he will present a sexual threat to her,
but when he meets the girl and examines the whole house more closely, there is
an unexpected change in him. He is strangely
awed and respectful of this world and its people.
Interestingly, the scene with her canopy bed reminds me of
the scene in Wyler’s other film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) when Dana Andrews wakes after a drunken night in Teresa
Wright’s canopy bed, and he amusedly blows on the canopy’s frills, surprised to
find himself in such a feminine haven.
When father and daughter come home from work, and Junior
comes home from school, the entire family is held hostage and they are moved
from room to room at gunpoint. In some scenes, it even looks as if they are
camping in their own home as they try to stay together.
Martin seems more than attracted to daughter Mary Murphy; there
is a shy, almost boyish crush he exhibits for her. Bogart notices the
attraction and jokes that when they leave, they will take the daughter with
them as a hostage just as a present for his younger brother. It is a chilling
moment.
But the brother protects the girl from Robert Middleton, who
is a far greater danger not only to her but everyone in the house, even to Bogey,
because he is so undisciplined and so mentally unstable.
The real terror in the film comes from the sudden
destruction of the blessed normality of their everyday lives. They live in a
world of 1950s conformity, and though it may get a little stale sometimes, they
know they are safe there. Their safety has been shattered not necessarily by
three escaped convicts, one of them with a gun, but that the normality is gone
and the unknown has entered their lives.
One gun becomes two as Bogart discovers that the family
keeps a pistol in the house. This evens up the score a little and makes Bogart
happy because Middleton has the other one.
But there is an even greater danger to Bogart than Robert
Middleton’s instability. It is his younger brother. Dewey Martin doesn’t want
to take over his brother’s life of crime anymore. When Bogart tells him to
stick with him, that he got them out of prison and he will take care of him,
that he taught him everything he knows – a common manipulation used by the
heads of families to keep the younger in line – Dewey Martin disgustedly replies,
“You taught me everything, except how to live in a house like this.”
If Dewey Martin was not dissatisfied with his life in
prison, he certainly is now because he sees a glaring comparison to how his
life has gone. This is a nice home, with a nice family. If Mary Murphy’s beau, Gig
Young, is not welcomed by her parents, then what chance would he have? Even
though he respectfully calls her, “Miss,” and calls Fredric March, “Sir.”
The family has its own struggles, its own splinters and
breakdowns, and coming together. Unfortunately for Fredric March, who tries to
shepherd his family through this terrible experience and proves himself to be
courageous and very intelligent in how he manages to outmaneuver the bad guys,
his greatest handicap is also his greatest treasure – his family. Neither his
daughter nor his son obey his explicit instructions and they mess things up,
even his wife rebels and throws a monkey wrench into the works. At some point
we have to wonder if March just wants to throw his hands up and yell, “All
right then, go get yourself killed! I’m sick of talking to you people!”
But he doesn’t. At one point when he is allowed to leave the
house on a mission for the bad guys, he stumbles onto the dragnet by the cops who
have traced Bogart’s whereabouts, and he has to plead with them to allow him to
go back in to mediate the situation because he doesn’t want them shooting up
his house and killing his entire family. They reluctantly agree, but give him a
gun. He empties it of all the bullets. He takes it with him. The cops think
he’s nuts, but we see in the course of his last gambit that he is more clever
than anybody.
It is an intricate and interesting movie and fast-paced but I
won’t linger too much on the heroics of the family. This blogathon is about
outlaws. In the tradition of classic films, none of these outlaws comes to a
good end.
We may not mourn Robert Middleton, he’s just too scary and
too bad, and has already committed one murder right before our eyes.
Dewey Martin has the greater share of our sympathy and how
he meets his end is entirely accidental and tragic because he is escaping his
brother and a life he does not want.
Bogart plays his cards all the way to the end, and it’s just
March and Bogart at the end. March has outsmarted him because he has managed it
so that Bogart holds the gun with no bullets in it.
When March has his own gun, Bogart sneers, “You ain’t got in
you.”
March growls, “I’ve got it in me. You put it there.”
Then March does something so effective and perhaps even cruel,
to get back at Bogart. Having heard the news about Bogart’s brother’s death –
which Bogart doesn’t know – March tells him how his brother died and he sneers
and shouts, “You did it! How do you like it?”
This is really the end of Humphrey Bogart. Yes, he has a few
more minutes in the film, and yes, he rushes out into the police spotlights and
drops down on their front lawn only a few feet from the boy’s bicycle that had
brought him to the house in the first place, but it was really upon hearing of the
death of his brother, the end of his family, and the collapse of his authority
that kills him.
Some may say that Bogart was a little too old to play this
role, especially if they had seen Paul Newman play it on Broadway, but this is
a different interpretation. Movies are different from plays. We wouldn’t have
had all the cops in the play, we wouldn’t have all the bicycles, the milk
delivery trucks and the sound of crickets in the evening. We wouldn’t have had
March’s bewildered office staff in front of whom he has to pretend, we wouldn’t
have had the roadhouse where Dewey Martin tries to escape. We wouldn’t have had
the town dump where Robert Middleton commits a cruel and vicious murder.
Bogart was in his element in this role because Bogart was in
his own world. Hollywood at this time took its gangster movies from the faux city
streets of its backlot and soundstages, to a wider and somehow more complex
world on a backlot suburbia. The Cleavers would move into that house – on
television of course – and the conformity of suburbia would cover over Bogart,
Dewey Martin, and Robert Middleton, like a blanket of snow, masking the
ugliness, but not obliterating it.
The 1950s introduced us to new bad guys – psychos,
rebellious youth, juvenile delinquents. They would be more at home here in
suburbia. They could not be gotten rid of so easily, like the crabgrass on the
lawns of the middle-class homeowners; they were rooted and endemic.
