Le puits

I saw this film a few times as a kid back in the 60s or 70s. I remember it as pretty good for its time. I also remember Harry Morgan from "Dragnet" as being the only cast member I recognized then or now. I was mostly caught up in watching how supposedly reasonable people in the grip of panic, impatience, and uncertainty make assumptions, point fingers, cast blame, and jump to conclusions. Misunderstandings pile up on top of each like a 10-car highway accident and push the town closer and closer to a dreaded race riot while the actual victim's plight seems all but forgotten.

For its time, I'm sure this movie was a bold move. It's a shame it hasn't been broadcast again recently. It's definitely worth a look.

This is a normal small American town, for years the mixed race inhabitants have lived in total harmony as one community. But when little black girl Carolyn Crawford falls down a well, she's feared to have been kidnapped, and this after having last being seen with a white man in town. This town becomes something completely different....

The Well, a B budgeted movie with a cast consisting largely of unknowns. Dually directed by two equally unheralded men. Boasting a DVD cover that has nothing to do with the theme of the film, and shunted out of conscious by the release the same year of Billy Wilder's bigger produced, "person in underground peril," Ace In The Hole.

It's a crime in itself that this B movie gem has had the odds stacked against it getting wider and more productive exposure. For thematically, which is three fold, it's a film that desperately deserves more people to take it on and appraise it in the modern age. Released in 1951, before racial tensions were to explode into American history, The Well is a brave offering from co-writer's Russell Rouse {also co-director} and Clarence Greene. Not content to just offer up a one dimensional rescue piece concerning mixed races, they take the ugly racial aggression here and sit it next to the ugliness of human wild fire ignorance. From a dubiously casted assumption, this town implodes, and it's an ugliness that paints the human race in a dim and unflattering light. Even the police, on who this town depends on, are pulled along by the tide of insanity. Five burly officers interrogating one bemused and frightened suspect, they have their man regardless of facts. Something that over the course of history we know has reared its ugly head. It very much reminded me of a Rod Serling Twilight Zone episode called "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street". Anyone familiar with that particular piece will have some idea of what drives The Well forward.

Possibly part inspired by the sad and tragic case of little Kathy Fiscus, who in 1949 fell down a San Marino well, Rouse's picture shifts to an equally, and engrossing gear for its final third. After having been caught up in the town coming apart, we, as well as the town, suddenly get a jolt back to earth. There is after all a little girl missing here. Now we get the inevitable tonal shift that most viewers would have expected, but it's no less dramatic for it. And it's now when the film well and truly makes its point, a point of reference that should be heeded as long as we all shall live.

Having a cast of relative no names, tho Barry Kelley as Sam Packard and Harry Morgan as Claude Packard will be names to some {ie:me!} really gives the film a grounded in reality feel. It's not hard to accept these people as small town residents, and thus the film is far better for it. The story is further aided by the score from Dimitri Tiomkin, at times funereal, at others a booming bombastic character itself. Sadly the print of the film is desperately in need of a remaster, which as it's unlikely to get one, means that the cinematography work of Ernest Laszlo struggles to come thru. But don't let the print put you off, if you get the chance to see this film then don't pass up the chance, for you may find yourself better off for the experience. 9/10

My , My, what can happen when a little girl turns up missing. A 5 year old black girl in 1951. This film shows just how easily things can get out of control when a white man is accused of abducting her. This film is nearly fifty years old and it makes one wonder just how far have we really come in those fifty years? A few years after this film was made, another called To Kill A Mockingbird came out on a similar subject. That one is considered a classic while The Well has been all but forgotten. It really is a shame because the Well is every bit as good.

As a boy growing up in the 1950's South being surrounded by racial and religious prejudices (My father made Archie Bunker seem like a bleeding-heart liberal.) I remember being impressed and educated by seeing two great little films. The Well was one and Storm Warning was the other. Both were made in 1951. I guess you could say that Storm Warning was an A-movie as it featured Ginger Rogers, Ronald Reagan, and Doris Day as the stars.

The Well was definitely a B-movie, but its subject matter gave it a step-up on most of the B-movies of the time. Keep in mind that this was a period in time in which people went to double features and the local movie house and drive-ins as television was just an infant and not available except to a few. B-movies were generally low-budget films cranked out for more or less mindless entertainment.

The plot is pretty standard. A little Black girl is on her way to school and wanders into a field to pick some flowers where she falls into an abandoned well. The search for the little girl is begun. A man in town to visit his uncle - a rich and powerful businessman - who was seen talking to the girl comes under suspicion. As he is "grilled" by the police, the uncle storms into the station and demands his release to no avail. As the uncle is leaving the station, he is questioned by the little girl's father who has heard of the nephew. There is a scuffle, and the uncle falls and is injured. As news of the incident is spread and embellished with false rumors, all hell breaks loose. Just as the town is on the verge of an all-out racial riot, a boy rushes in to announce that he has discovered the little girl's things next to the well. From that point on, all the town's energies are concentrated upon saving the little girl. The uncle provides heavy equipment from his business, and the nephew - who just happens to be a mining expert - is convinced to save the day.

All of this is carried out in over-the-top B-movie melodramatic fashion supported by just about every '50's cliché character including the strong lawman leader; his sensible love interest; the businessman who runs the town; the pleading, helpless mother; the racially biased beat cop; and young people of both races who run rampant destroying property and beating on each other.

So why the eight stars? The time. The content. The message. Since the beginning of film, movie makers have strived to bring education to their audiences through entertainment. This film surely deserves recognition for demonstrating the evils of racial prejudice and rumor in an effective and entertaining fashion.

In 1951, Rosa Parks had not yet declined to move to the back of the bus, the schools had yet to be desegregated, and pleas for racial equality were generally spurned as part of a `pinko' agenda. So It must have taken some measure of courage to make this movie, for one of its two themes is racism. Its second theme – and the one that ultimately trumps the first – involves the rescue of a little black girl (and parallels, minus the cynicism, Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival of the same year).

The trouble starts with the girl's disappearance. Rumors start to fly: A stranger was seen buying her a clump of posies. Is a child-killer on the loose? Will he get away with it because he's white? Soon fist-fights, beatings and acts of arson, all committed on racial grounds, tear the down apart. The drifter (Harry Morgan), when found, proves to be related to a town big-wheel who, when his construction company is set afire, becomes the chief rabble-rouser. The townsfolk of color, meanwhile, clamor for Morgan's hide. It falls to the sheriff (Richard Rober) first to locate the girl then to stem the violence before a lynch mob coalesces. Suddenly, by chance, the girl is discovered deep down an abandoned well....

Probably, in 1951, there was no way out of the story than the one taken. But it's pure Hollywood – which is to say, a harp concerto played on the heart strings. The whole town, black and white, joins together in a tense, all-night rescue effort helmed by the construction magnate and Morgan, who luckily happens to be a mining engineer. (Here, something curious occurs. The digging of a parallel shaft, with monstrous drill-bits assaulting the earth to Dimitri Tiomkin's pounding score, becomes all but abstract – and primitively, uncomfortably sexual.)

The minor but ever interesting Russell Rouse wrote and, in his first go, directed The Well (though he shares that credit with producer Leo Popkin). It features a large (and largely unknown) cast who bring authenticity and occasionally depth to their roles. The story holds attention – despite a glaring break in the middle, when the focus shifts from racism to rescue. And again, for its era, it was bold and topical (brutal race riots plagued post-war America). But from a modern perspective, it just ends too soon. The uplifting rescue will be the talk of the town for three days, while the ugliness that flared up will linger on. There's not a hint of that at the conclusion, with Tiomkin outdoing even John Williams in gaudy triumphalism.