Un grito en la noche

Edmund O'Brien is one of my favorite actors. He was able to play cynical and he was able to play tough. And, with his rather ugly mug, he was the perfect film noir hero or anti-hero. However, "A Cry in the Night" is the rarest of films--an Edmund O'Brien film that I did not particularly like--or at least his character. He was, in my opinion, the weakest link in the film.

The film begins with two young lovers (Richard Anderson and Natalie Wood) out at lover's lane when they notice some strange man lurking in the bushes--staring at them. Anderson goes to see who this guy is and sees a much larger and very crazy Raymond Burr--who proceeds to beak the stuffing out of Anderson. And, following this attack, Burr e kidnaps Wood and drags her away to his secret lair. His motivation and character, though not realistic, is pretty cool--and fun to watch unfold throughout the film.

Naturally, the police eventually get involved--especially since Wood turns out to be the daughter of tough cop O'Brien. But, as he's not on duty and this crime strikes close to home, Brian Donlevy plays the detective who is in charge of the case--and I liked his character. But O'Brien--what a rather one-dimensional and annoying guy. He is, at times, almost cartoon-like--with his snarling and growling...and not acting the least bit like a professional. He is, to put it bluntly, pretty annoying.

Overall, the film has some interesting moments and is worth seeing--just don't expect a particularly inspired movie. For fans of noir or O'Brien, it's worth seeing---for all others, it's just a time-passer.

When Raymond Burr's face (grotesquely lighted by John F. Seitz) looms out of the shrubbery at Lovers' Loop, he adds A Cry in the Night to his long string of films in which he cemented his reputation as the noir cycle's most indispensable and unforgettable creep. He's prowling the petting grounds looking for a girl, and doesn't care how he gets her. Assaulting the male half (Richard Anderson) of a necking couple, he kidnaps the other (Natalie Wood), spiriting her off to a den he's fixed up in an abandoned brickyard. This time, though, there's a catch to Burr's villainy: He's a dim-witted hulk, a childish monster akin to Lennie in Of Mice And Men.

The police mistake the dazed Anderson for a drunk and lock him up. Only when a doctor suspects concussion does his story emerge, leading captain Brian Donleavy to mobilize a dragnet for Wood and her abductor. As it happens, Wood's father (Edmond O'Brien) is one of their own, a hot-headed, rigid cop out for blood - he throws a punch at the already reeling Anderson. Meanwhile Burr plies Wood with apricot pie and sequined gowns, as she desperately tries to flee. A break in the case comes when Burr's mother calls in to report her 32-year-old son missing....

Along with Burr, A Cry in the Night unites stalwarts of the cycle Donleavy and O'Brien; even the familiar voice in the opening narration belongs to Alan Ladd, who appeared in this director Frank Tuttle's This Gun For Hire 14 years earlier. The movie stays a pretty standard police procedural, albeit with a few intriguing touches. It offers as subtexts some period glimpses into dysfunctional parenting. His spinster sister, another victim of his vigilance against beaux come a-couring, accuses the overprotective O'Brien of driving Wood to Lovers' Loop and hence to peril.

Even less wholesome is Carol Veazie as Burr's doting, sweet-toothed mother. Managing simultaneously to suggest Dame Judith Anderson, Jean Stapleton and Doris Roberts, she shuffles around drinking coffee in her horse-blanket bathrobe, whining about that missing slice of apricot pie. Nineteen-fifty-six, some may recall, was the high-water mark of a national panic about `Momism,' a threat deemed scarcely less perilous to the republic than the international Communist conspiracy; Veazie endures as one of its most formidable operatives (her successors would include the unseen Mrs. Bates in Psycho, Angela Lansbury's Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate, and Marjorie Bennet's Dehlia Flagg in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?).

Early in the movie, before the tight walls of his world come tumbling down, O'Brien pours himself a beer and waits for the nightly movie on TV. When it starts, he sighs, `Another one of those cop pictures,' and switches it off. There he was, in the Indian Summer of the noir cycle, and couldn't care less. Couldn't he have forseen that, almost 50 years later, there would be an avid audience for those cop pictures - even the ones starring him?

"A Cry in the Night" starts fast: an idealized fifties couple parked in a convertible at the local Inspiration Point, a conked boyfriend, a kidnapped teenage girl (inevitably, the police captain's daughter). From there it fans out into a number of ideas, most of which wander into the dark and disappear, none of which are delivered with any particular inspiration.

We get the question of personal responsibility and "getting involved" when no one else on the scene responds to Natalie Wood's cries for help- from which the title derives- with anything more than mockery. We get the question of how a monster is made when we meet Raymond Burr's horrific and self-absorbed mother. We get the idea of Natalie Wood, victim, fighting to survive by forging a personal connection with her captor. We get the idea that her home life was another form of captivity. Nonetheless, all we really get is a police chase, and it's a pretty mundane one.

From Raymond Burr, we get an interpretation of an unstable but very human mentally-challenged person that builds in places on Lon Chaney Jr.'s performance in "Of Mice and Men", but is still just an unconvincing sketch. From nearly every one else, we get a lot of scenery-nibbling where chewing is called for: Edmond O'Brien, as the missing girl's father, takes his anger level to about a seven and is always willing to stop and quibble about minor distractions. Natalie Wood does a fine job, but knowing what she had been through personally by this time in her young life makes her character's situation more than a bit painful.

Perhaps fortunately, sexual tension is greatly minimized by the era of the film: it's there, eventually, but a much more overt rape threat might truly have demonized Burr's character and thus done a disservice to people who were already marginalized in society.

Unsurprisingly, the subplot in which the Taggart family problems are brought to light by the ordeal at hand is absurdly simplistic and about as subtle and deft as a sledgehammer.

It all moves briskly enough, and Burr's creepy lair is a plus, along with the exciting situation, but there's a much better film in this material. To see a fairly similar story in far more skilled hands (only a year earlier), check out William Wyler's "The Desperate Hours".

A brilliant performance by Raymond Burr as a mentally-challenged man who feels stifled by his mother makes "A Cry in the Night" a good watch. The film also stars Brian Donlevy and Edmund O'Brien.

Natalie Wood plays Elizabeth, the teenaged daughter of police Captain Taggart (O'Brien) involved with Owen (Anderson) - the two of them are together in a lovers' lane when Owen sees someone watching them. He gives chase and gets knocked out for his trouble. The voyeur, Harold Loftus (Burr) kidnaps Elizabeth.

Anyone who's watched the news or the ID channel knows that as kidnappings go, this was pretty benign. We also know a little bit more about how to handle a kidnapper - Elizabeth finally catches on and tries to befriend him. Meanwhile, her hot-tempered father is frantically looking for her and comes up against Harold's overprotective mother (Carol Veazie).

Burr is just the saddest character in this, it's heartbreaking. Natalie is very pretty and, as we have seen in other films, good at histrionics.

Since it was made in 1956, the film has a few questionable or politically incorrect moments, like when a fellow lovers' lane person hears Elizabeth screams and says, "Slap her again. They like it." And there's the subplot of Taggart's sister still unmarried because her brother broke them up - apparently she didn't care how lousy he was since he was breathing. And Elizabeth's mother tells her husband "not to scare away" the one Elizabeth has on the hook.

Schools today sometimes ban these politically incorrect films - ones that are much more blatant than this. I think it's a great idea for new generations to see them and understand how women were thought of and what was important to them - husbands.

See if for Burr's striking performance.

Edmond O'Brien gets to chew the scenery as a desperate police captain on the hunt for a blubbering, wallowing, cretinous pervert/Peeping Tom/kidnapper played by Raymond Burr, in one of his last roles before starting work on "Perry Mason." The kidnapper played by Burr has snatched O'Brien's daughter, played by Natalie Wood, from a tryst on Lover's Lane with a car salesman played by Richard Anderson, who was later to play Oscar Goldman in "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Bionic Woman." You can see the ending a million miles away, but the point isn't the plot as much as the B-movie feel and the often unintentionally hilarious line readings, characters, and themes. The film is a mediocre example of a kind of morality play that frequented American film-making in the 1950s, with a stern father with an explosive temper -- O'Brien -- ruling with an iron fist over a household that on the surface seems perfect but which of course has shadows lurking within, complete with a simpering wife and a dark (but not that dark) secret that gets revealed at the end, and with ham-handed references to sub-Freudian psychological motivations for the kidnapper's brutish behavior. Natalie Woods looks and acts every bit the part of a quivering, naive 18-year-old fifties débutante, in a role that would have had Elizabeth Taylor finding a way to scratch the kidnapper's eyes out. O'Brien is the prototypical cop who can't leave his work at home and spends most of the movie haranguing his hapless night supervisor and browbeating his daughter's boyfriend. Anderson doesn't really look the part of a young boyfriend, but then again, Natalie Wood was dating Raymond Burr behind the scenes while the film was being shot. The ending is abrupt and pat.