The Desperate Hours (1955)

Directed and produced by William Wyler

After escaping from prison, a violent criminal (Humphrey Bogart), his brother (Dewey Martin) and an accomplice (Robert Middleton) hide in a quiet, suburban house. The head of the household (Fredric March) is told that the convicts will be gone at midnight, when the leader’s girlfriend arrives but, fearing for his family, he knows much can happen in the interval.

A tense and involving film from start to finish, The Desperate Hours was Bogart’s penultimate movie, and one of his best. Superficially, it has a similarity, in setting and in Bogart’s character, with The Petrified Forest, which made him a star nineteen years earlier. In both cases, innocent people are taken hostage by crooks on the run, who must wait for a woman to arrive. But, while Duke Mantee, whom Bogart portrayed in the first film, is more of a catalyst than a character, Glenn Griffin, whom he plays in The Desperate Hours, is fully a part of the drama.

  

The movie depends upon the two leads. Bogart injects menace into the story from his first scene. Indeed, the movie would have failed if he had not, and demonstrates how good an actor Bogart was. His mannerisms, expressions and tone of voice are familiar; he used them in almost every role. Yet Griffin is cruel and vicious, even sadistic; beyond Mantee (viewers won’t be persuaded that Griffin cares more about the woman he’s waiting for than the money she’s bringing him), miles away from Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep) and the opposite of Rick Blaine (Casablanca). How Bogart manages to create such a frightening creature with tools so little different than those utilized to make likeable rogues and even heroes must be attributed partly to talent and partly to sheer presence. Bogart was a true movie star.

Equal to Bogart, though in a necessarily more subdued part is March. Initially, we see him as a contented, even happy family man, whose biggest problems are that his little son (Richard Eyer) wants to be called ‘Ralph’ instead of ‘Ralphie’, and that his daughter (Mary Murphy) may be serious about her new boyfriend (Gig Young). But as the situation worsens and the strain builds, March convincingly portrays hope, intelligence, fear, panic and rage, all of which must be kept contained, until the very end. March must show many of these emotions almost invisibly, so as to keep the villains from understanding his thoughts. Even so, Griffin reads his hostage well.

The other actors are uniformly good. Martha Scott as the wife and mother behaves as most would, trying to maintain composure in the face of immense pressure; Arthur Kennedy, as the police officer familiar with Griffin, starts off with seemingly selfish reasons for wanting to stop the criminals, but becomes March’s best ally outside the house. A very young Beverly Garland plays a school-teacher and comic actor Joe Flynn a terrified motorist.

The interaction between Bogart and March forms much of The Desperate Hours, but the former’s scenes with Martin, as the younger brother, also have great interest. We see the elder Griffin as someone who loves his sibling, but in a bullying, denigrating manner, disguised as teaching the boy how to live in a harsh world. The young man’s brief glimpse of kids his age heading off to a party speaks volumes about lost opportunities and wasted lives.

The script is excellent, as might be expected in a movie from a Tony Award-winning play, and intellligent. The direction is as good, turning what could have been simply a filmed stage-work into a real movie, and a bit of an action picture at that. However, the tension that is created, the suspense that keeps the viewer watching, comes from words and emotions, rather than deeds, and that is greatly to the director’s credit.

Despite the shoot-outs, the beatings and the outdoor scenes, The Desperate Hours is about character – and characters: how they conflict and how they coöperate. Though the writing and direction cannot be faulted, it is a showcase for actors, in particular the two veterans: March and Bogart, the latter surely already feeling the effects of the cancer that would kill him soon afterward.