Beeil dich zu leben

Make Haste to Live showed me once again what an inexhaustible source of good movies Classic Hollywood was. I've seen many but there's always another one and the treasure chest seems to have no bottom. This is a small film, in black and white but with a wider format than the traditional one. It was produced and directed for Republic Pictures by William Seiter based on a script by Warren Duff. It is a noir story, set in a small town in the State of New Mexico where life is peaceful and predictable. There, in the local newspaper works as an editor Crystal Benson (Dorothy McGuire) a supposed widow with her daughter Randy (Mary Murphy) of 18 years who is about to graduate from high school. But at night, she has nightmares, because the past is about to take its revenge. In reality Randy's father was a gang member named Steve (Steven McNally) who has just left prison after a long sentence for the supposed murder of his wife Zena. In reality, Zena has changed her name and is now Crystal, and when she ran away from her husband, she was pregnant and not thinking clearly. Her friend Rose (Carolyn Jones, the famous Morticia of the Addams Family) tried to explain Zena's situation but was not convincing and, faced with the doubt and the unidentified corpse that implicated Steve, the latter ended up being sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In the town, the sheriff is Edgar Buchanan, an actor who played countless supporting roles in westerns and other genres. And we also meet Crystal's long-suffering suitor, Josh, played by another efficient B-movie actor, John Howard, a former pilot during the Second World War and now a scholar of the labyrinthine dwellings built by the Indians who inhabited the region, the Pueblo tribe.

Things will get heated in this interesting thriller in which I will not fail to praise the exceptional performance of the two main characters, Dorothy McGuire and Stephen McNally. Every time they are together, and luckily it is a big part of the film, the level of tension and drama rises. She appears calm but is actually desperate and he is perversely threatening like a volcano about to erupt. It is worth seeing them act.

The best part is the first : one does not know why Dorothy macGuire awakes in fear at night,why she's so frightened,why she entrusts a hefty sum of money to someone she can depend on; when one learns the reason why ,it's a little disappointing and derivative ; the screenplay does not make any sense and Stephen McNally's - although ideally cast as the villain- motives are not clearly defined ; for good measure ,there's even a love rivalry a la "imitation of life" between mother and daughter,which is rather ludicrous ,in this case!

The use of the Indian excavations ,particularly the funeral chamber , redeems somewhat the movie in the last scenes .A good beginning and a suspenseful ending ,you make it on the percentages ,but lose out on the bonuses: average.

I didn't really understand what the ex-con ex-husband "had" on the main character and what he was trying to do to her and her daughter. I did like the small Western town setting with the Indian Ruins excavation site and the idea of her attempting to escape via the chartered plane, the suspense and down-to-the-wire excitement. And the villain was a menacing character.

I expected "Sleeping with the Enemy" but this wasn't it. The tension wasn't there. I just wasn't afraid for the good guys or scared of the bad guy. I had hoped that the bottomless pit shown in the opening scene would play a bigger part, but it didn't - and it would have made a grand finale! But the ending was very disappointing!

When her gangster husband is paroled, a woman fears for herself and her teenage daughter. Sounds like a good "out of the past" premise, but turns out to be a tepid thriller. There are brief hints of danger but they fizzle out, with Stephen McNally being a rather non-threatening presence and Dorothy McGuire uneven in her characterization. One minute she's haunted by nightmares, the next she seems quite comfortable with the situation. This thing just has no guts to it. What kind of movie teases the audience with a bottomless pit and then denies them the payoff? I've heard of Chekhov's Gun, but Chekhov's Hole? A nice score by Elmer Bernstein is wasted on this humdrum do-nothing picture.