Time Without Pity

Time Without Pity is directed by Joseph Losey and adapted to screenplay by Ben Barzman from the Emlyn Williams play Someone Waiting. It stars Michael Redgrave, Ann Todd, Leo McKern, Paul Daneman, Peter Cushing, Alec McCowen, Renee Houston and Lois Maxwell. Music is by Tristram Cary and cinematography by Freddie Francis.

David Graham (Redgrave) is a recovering alcoholic who comes out of the sanitarium to try and prove his son is innocent of murder. His son, Alec (McCowen), is to be hanged in 24 hours for the slaying of his girlfriend. David finds he is constantly met with brick walls and his sobriety is tested at every turn, but salvation may lie with the suspicious Stanford family...

Blacklisted in America, Joseph Losey went to the UK and made a number of films under various pseudonyms, Time Without Pity marked the first time he would put his own name to the production. It's also a film that stands tall as another of Losey's excellent British offerings.

Losey and his team do not make a murder mystery, from the off we see who the killer is and it's not young Alec Graham. This is a device that in the wrong hands has often over the years proved costly, where viewers looking for suspense have been sorely short changed. What happens here is that we are privy to an investigation by a man in misery, battling his demons as he frantically searches for redemption.

Tick Tock. Tick Tock.

Shunned by his estranged son, who would rather be hanged for a crime he didn't commit than accept his "waster" father's help - that might in turn give him false hope, David Graham is a haunted being who is closer to solving the case than he knows. This brings us viewers tantalisingly into the play, we know who it is, we can see how they react around David and how the other players who are hiding something also behave from scene to scene. The script never looses focus, it constantly keeps a grip on the tension as the clock ticks down on the Graham's.

Tick Tock. Tick Tock.

Losey and the great Freddie Francis are a dream pairing, a meeting of minds who could produce striking lighting compositions and scenes of other worldly distinction. Time Without Pity is full of such film making smarts. Time is a key, obviously, clocks feature constantly, including one classic era film noir extended scene as David visits a potential witness who has her home filled with alarm clocks! Alarm clocks that keep going off at regular intervals, thus putting an already twitchy and sweaty David Graham further on the edge of his nerves.

Tick Tock. Tick Tock.

One scene enforces that on the page there's an anti-capital punishment message, but as a bunch of suits sit in a room digressing about the ethics of it all etc, Losey and Francis fill the room with stripped shadows filtered via the lead patterned windows, it's that what you remember, not a social message. Gorgeous and potent all in one. Mirrors feature as well, with one elevator shot superb, while the bittersweet ending deserves better credit than it got at the time of release. Certainly noir lovers will enjoy it as much as they enjoy some other kinks in the story narrative.

Over the top of it all is a brilliant musical score by Tristram Cary (all his 50s work is worth checking out), three years before Herrmann brought bloodied strings to Psycho, Cary deals from an earlier deck of cards with string menace supreme, while his ticking clock motif is a pearler. Redgrave is terrific, a sweaty mass of fragility, while Todd, Cushing and Houston (wonderful) bring class to their respective characters. Losey's misstep is in not reigning in McKern, who is way too animated throughout, but such is the strength of everything elsewhere, it can't hurt the picture at all. Oh and look out for future Miss. Moneypenny Lois Maxwell, the little minx.

Now widely available on DVD with a good print, Time Without Pity demands to be better known. 9/10

Michael Redgrave plays David Graham, the alcoholic father of a young man (Alec McCowen) on death row in "Time Without Pity" from 1957. The film also stars Ann Todd, Leo McKern, Peter Cushing, Paul Daneman, Lois Harker, Joan Plowright, and Renee Houston.

Graham's son Alec is accused of killing a young woman. David was not around for the trial, due to a stint in rehab (which doesn't seem to have taken). Alec is very hostile to him now.

Meanwhile, Alec's surrogate family, the Stanfords (McKern, Todd, and Daneman) are at odds - Mr. Stanford wants nothing to do with the case or Alec, where his wife and son want to help. It seems to David that everyone is keeping secrets, and he has to find out what they are before his son is hanged.

Okay film but by today's more subtle acting standards, way over the top in some cases. Michael Redgrave is wonderful, desperate, fighting for his son's life as he battles his habit. Leo McKern, a magnificent character actor best known as Rumpole of the Bailey, yells his way through his role. He's in good company with the loud, overdramatic music. Ann Todd gives a lovely performance.

There are a couple of jarring editing mistakes you won't miss.

Michael Redgrave, the head of a great acting dynasty of children and grandchildren, is always worth seeing. See it for him.

A bizarre psychogram of a series of characters, all of whom are disturbed in their own manner. Losey delineates the characters through a series of images which are so effective because they're so simple.

A cheap B-movie. The choppy dramaturgy and editing, viewed from today's perspective, conveys a nervousness and an intensity to the film that was probably lost on a 50's audience. No happy end, but a just and noble one.

I found this film so mesmerizing that when it ended, I put it on again and watched it a second time. There are complaints galore voiced by reviewers here, and almost without exception I don't understand them. They say the film is overacted. That it is incoherent. That the musical score is terrible. That the police should have easily identified the killer. And on we go. I admit to being a performance-driven viewer, and except for, of all things, a Walter Huston-Claudette Colbert film from 1929, I don't think I've seen a new (to me) movie in at least a year (and I sometimes watch three or four a night) that was as excitingly acted as was this one. This is not a spoiler, but I will list it as such, just in case, as seems to be the case here, some people didn't watch the opening of the film. It starts with the murder - somewhat accidental - of a beautiful girl by an enraged Leo McKern. There, everybody knows this from the first 30 seconds (even before the credits appear), so you should, too. Right from that scene, and in every other one in which he appears, McKern is shown to be something of a nut job. He flies off the handle at anybody and everybody with what may be the loudest voice in the British Theater. His wife is afraid of him, his son seems to be terrified of him, and at all times he acts like someone who could go off the deep end in about 15 seconds. This is the character as written! Leo McKern does not OVERACT it. When someone asks why the police didn't cotton on to him as the potential murderer, the answer is simple: he has an alibi for the time of the killing, and being the wealthy head of a large and successful company, it is obvious that he can keep his terrible temper under control when in professional or non-family settings. Besides which, the victim's boyfriend got drunk with her, and then when found the next morning, could not recall the prior night's events, and never claims absolute innocence because he's not certain he didn't kill her. Enter his father, as magnificently played by Michael Redgrave. With all the great roles he played on screen from THE LADY VANISHES on to DEAD OF NIGHT and THE BROWNING VERSION, I think this is the best acting job of his screen career. He is a severe alcoholic who has just spent two years in a Canadian sanitarium, divorced by his doctors from just about any contact with the outside world, even to the confiscation of newspapers and magazines, and upon release he finds that his son is about to be executed for murder. Arriving in London by plane, he looks right from the start like an extremely troubled and vulnerable man who may, even in the absence of his son's problems, be exerting only a tenuous hold on his sanity and emotions. Redgrave goes through the entire film in the most incredibly complex gradations of the character we first see, and how he was able to keep those gradations going so well, scene to scene, over what must have been at least a few weeks of filming is damn near awe-inspiring. Think of his ventriloquist character in DEAD OF NIGHT, take the insanity out and put paranoia, fear, guilt and a sense of impending doom in its place, and that is the person Redgrave plays so perfectly through every second of the entire film. It is a great performance, as good or better than anything else he did on the screen. Also to be mentioned here is an actor I did not previously know, Paul Daneman, as McKern's son. A handsome young man, Daneman looks uncomfortable, frightened, squeamish, and near suicidal throughout a good portion of the film, and as you get to know Dad, you understand why, but it is perhaps the only one of the lead performances that might be termed 'underacted'. I will see more of his work. And Ann Todd is excellent, and very beautiful (more so than in many earlier films), at, for the 1950s, the relatively late age of 48. The three other ladies in the film, Lois Maxwell (in an unusual role for her as a femme fatale), Renee Houston (magnificently coarse and blowsy as Lois's mother) and, if you can believe it, Joan Plowright as a cheapish chorus girl are excellent. In any large cast that incudes Peter Cushing, and where Cushing is rather pushed into the shade by the other actors, you know you are getting a textbook lesson in the art of acting, even if a lot of it is over-the-top. But there's good over-the-top (think John Barrymore) and not so good over-the-top (think Bela Lugosi, at least on occasion), and while it is really Redgrave who holds the film together (except when he takes his trench coat off to try to wave down a racing car driven by McKern, and then at the very end for a different reason, he is dressed in that trench coat, indoors and outdoors, for the entire film, as the time he has to save his son's life is so compressed that he never seems to spend more than a few minutes in any one place), over-the-top honors belong to Mr. McKern every step of the way. And given that the story is based on an Emlyn Williams play, they must have opened it up considerably for the film, as it seems to take place all over London, instead of in one or two stage settings. I think the copy I've seen is the cut one mentioned elsewhere, as there are a couple of scenes that are rather sprung upon the viewer with no real lead-up - how did McKern end up in that pub drinking and lamenting the loneliness of his life with Redgrave (who would seem to be, in comparison, the loneliest man on the planet)? how was it decided that McKern would drive Redgrave anywhere at all? how did Ann Todd go from having her hair piled on high to having it down on her shoulders if a good slap from McKern did not effect the change? But we see none of this. Doesn't matter, though, since I'm not recommending this as one of the great mysteries (we know who did it, but how will everybody else find out?), or noirs, or even as containing the most sensible of cast characterizations. I'm simply recommending it for the acting and the pure visceral excitement that can be garnered from watching great British actors acting greatly, and especially under the masterful direction of Joseph Losey. (And the finale is a killer - in more ways than one!)

I finally caught this interesting little film about six months ago on Turner Classic films. This is based on one of Emlyn Williams twisty murder plays (like his classic, NIGHT MUST FALL). Here we have Michael Redgrave as the father of Alec MacGowan (who is on death row) trying to find out who actually committed the murder his son is charged with. Redgrave is an alcoholic, and a failed parent, and his every effort is stymied by hostility and stonewalling. But slowly he realizes that the guilty party is a millionaire car manufacturer played by Leo McKern. Peter Cushing also appears, as the solicitor who gradually becomes convinced that Redgrave knows what he's talking about (a welcome normal role for the horror film star). I recommend the film, particularly for the ironic way that Redgrave finally turns the tables on McKern, making it impossible for McKern to escape punishment.