THE DESPERATE HOURS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 36, Issue 919, 22 March 1957, Page 18

THE DESPERATE HOURS

(Paramount-VistaVision) R: 13 and over only. HOUGH it’s VistaVision, this more than competent thriller is in black-and-white — black-and-white _ print, black -.and- white characters (except for the law-enforce-ment officers, plain and fancyclothed, who are a sort of ominous grey chorus. to

the central melodrama). The blacks are represented by Humphrey Bogart, Dewey Martin, Robert Middleton-three escaped convicts; the whites by Fredric March, Martha Scott, Mary Murphy, and young Richard Eyer-whose home the convicts select as a temporary hideout. It’s a fairly familiar set-up, almost a stereotype in fact. "He who hath a wife and child hath given hostages to fortune," and fortune in the form of three armed and hardened criminals is a raw deal. Indoors is terror, outdoors life must go on as if all was normal, lest worse befall. But if the situation is unoriginal, the players are more than’ competent, the director (William Wyler) is an expert in black-and-white, and the director of photography (Lee Garmes) is a skilled craftsman. These diverse talents manage to induce a pretty high tension, though it’s AC rather than DC-the action alternating between peaks of high-pres-sure excitement, with spurts of violent action, and troughs of numbed despair. Bogart-we’ll miss him-plays his most familiar character with the smoothness of long practice (and manages to inject more into the part of the chief gangster than one would have believed possible from the bare dialogue). But I appreciated just as much March’s portrait of the embattled father. I have seen him in a multitude of parts and offhand I can’t recall once being disappointed.