Les frontières de la vie

"Playhouse 90"-style drama of Vittorio Gassman trying to enter our country after World War II. He meets Gloria Grahame as she is stealing a coat (!) and finds her shabby room gloriously comfortable. I found it all quite entertaining: great music (jazz), cinematography, grubby characters who are nice to look at. The immigration theme is well-done but with a few annoyingly goofy plot turns.

A pungent period flavor of post-war New York elevates Maxwell Shane's The Glass Wall. If it's not quite noir (its idealism disqualifies it), it sure looks and feels like noir. As well it should, coming from the writer/director of those unambiguous noirs Fear in the Night (1947) and its remake Nightmare (1956).

In his first American film, Vittorio Gassman plays a stateless stowaway who's caught before his ship sails into New York harbor. Detained by immigration authorities, who won't believe his story that he qualifies for special consideration for aiding the Allies during the war, he's due to be returned to Trieste and certain death. But he jumps from the deck onto the docks, smashing his ribs, and starts stumbling around the city looking for the G.I. who can vouch for him (Jerry Paris). All Gassman knows is Paris' first name, and that he plays clarinet somewhere near Times Square (when we catch up with Paris, he's auditioning for Jack Teagarden's band).

During his nocturnal search, he runs into Gloria Grahame, who's very down on her luck. A sharp little minx who used to affix the tips to shoelaces for a living, now she steals coats from Automats (it's one of her more captivating performances). Grahame's at first wary of Gassman but quickly won over – his tale of woe makes her troubles look paltry, and he's the first guy to treat her decently. So she lets him hide out in her garret room (his escape makes the front pages) and helps him search for his old pal.

There's a beat-the-clock element that keeps the story moving: Gassman doesn't know that Paris has seen the tabloids and will vouch for him – or that his options will expire at dawn. And Shane stews the path with obstacles as well as with good Samaritans (Robin Raymond as a stripper with a heart of gold – another `Hunkie' – touchingly among them).

As the sky lightens, the desperate Gassman reaches the place he thinks will be his salvation: The forbidding `glass wall' of Wallace K. Harrison's just-completed United Nations Headquarters. But the building's empty of all but janitors, and Gassman still doesn't know that he's still safe....

The Glass Wall's a modest movie that overcomes the handicaps of its dated and idealistic `message' to succeed as a well told and acted human interest story. But it triumphs in its presentation of mid-20th-century Manhattan, as vividly raffish as in any movie of its period.

The plot of this movie is as fresh as today's news about refugees, asylum seekers, detentions and deportations, sensationalized images of immigrants, and the question of who gets to come to the US. Peter Kaban, a displaced person seeking to enter the US (Vittorio Gassman in a touching performance), escapes from detention and begins a desperate search through nighttime New York for the jazz musician who can corroborate his claims to having saved the life of an American soldier. The story has potential as a remake (sub Syria or Honduras for Hungary, etc)!

The America the writer-director (Maxwell Shane) portrays is not the wholesome suburbia many folks associate with the 1950s, but a tough tawdry urban jungle of sexual harassment, single moms surviving as strippers (Robin Raymond in a sympathetic turn), shabby single-room occupancy buildings,exploited factory workers, kids who have to dance in the street for coins, homeless people sleeping in subways, and desperate people eating food left behind in restaurants...brilliant imagery with a Noir atmosphere.

I did not fully understand Peter's story as a displaced person. He says clearly enough that the Nazis murdered his family and that he had been in Auschwitz, but he does not fill in much between WW II and 1953 --and so in 2018, it is difficult for us to understand exactly who he is and what happened to him in that period. 7-11 million people were wandering through Europe at the end of the war as "displaced persons": Jewish survivors of the Holocaust; Poles, Germans who had lived in Eastern Europe, and Ukrainians; refugees from the Baltic countries that were incorporated into the Soviet Union; and some Nazi collaborators fleeing the Soviets. The US passed strict and rather controversial legislation as to who could come to the US (e.g., only people who were already in displaced person camps by 1945 as well as many other rules), and Peter evidently did not match the approved profile. Maybe viewers in 1953 understood the context more clearly than the average viewer does now.

The movie came as a rather pleasant surprise. I wasn't expecting much, not having heard of it among Grahame's usual list of noirs. Nonetheless, it's imaginatively directed and generally suspenseful, despite a one-note plot. Refugee Kaban (Gassman) arrives in New York as a stowaway, but will be deported if he doesn't track down a musician friend. So he searches the dives along Times Square looking for the guy he last saw in Europe. While he's tracking his friend, however, the cops are tracking him. There's also a number of sub-plots concerning people he meets on the way, who sort of drift in and out.

There's atmosphere a-plenty as director Shane takes the camera crew along Times Square's night beat, which amounts to a dazzling b&w light show. At the same time, Gassman's gaunt frame and few words add to the carnival of characters. Grahame has a sympathetic role, for a change, which may be why the film remains obscure. Here, she's mostly a tag- along with Gassman and then with the cops. But I really like the unknown Robin Raymond as the personality-plus stripper who lights up the screen in a brief role.

At first, I thought "the glass wall" referred to Kaban's inability to enter the country as a stowaway. But then, the many imposing shots of the glass slab of the UN building changed my reference. Nonetheless, it looks like a number of scenes were actually filmed in the UN, lending the story even more visual appeal. All in all, the movie's a pretty good dramatic travelogue of downtown NYC, slim on plot and dialog but fat on inventive visuals. It's also reminiscent of a time when Europe's post-war DP's (displaced persons) were much in the news.

The Glass Wall (1953)

A great idea, and two great leads--Gloria Grahame as a down and out single girl and Vittoria Gassman as a Eastern European illegal immigrant. And one mediocre directing job--by Maxwell Shane. I had just seen another Shane film that was pretty good, with some great performances ("The Naked Street" with a terrific Anthony Quinn) so I was looking forward to this. It has a great theme (facing the immigration system) and it turns our attention to the new world presence for justice, the United Nations. It also features some real musicians--Jack Teagarden and Shorty Rogers--and one straight small combo big band jazz number. (I put it that way because by 1953 the real scene in New York was bebop, this this style predates it.)

So, the best parts of this movie are terrific, mainly the middle section where the two leads help each other and start to fall in love, with hints of an urban "They Live by Night" in mood. But there are parts where you can't help but laugh, because they are either so improbable or the editing and acting is ridiculously off key. Director Shane also co-wrote this adventure, and here there are hiccups, too, even down to the central premise of a man facing deportation even though he has nowhere to go and has been on the run for a decade. For one, it's hard to believe the immigration laws were so blindly inflexible, but let's say they were. They have the reputation. But certainly New York City wouldn't get turned upside down for one man, not considered dangerous, who has slipped from custody. There are APBs and front page photos and a general panic on the order of Son of Sam.

But we understand the dilemma anyway. It's one man against the system, and that's always an easy one for choosing sides. Grahame plays a woman on the outs with great sympathy and conviction, and she's just the kind of hardened, soft-hearted girl you'd want to fall in with if you were on the lam. And the ending, as badly directed and edited as it is (you'll see), is pure Hitchcock for its setting and high drama. We are taken inside the new United Nations building called the Secretariat in Manhattan (the International Style Le Corbusier skyscraper was finished in 1952), in what must be the first Hollywood movie to do so (and perhaps the last in this manner until "The Interpreter" in 2005, the site being secret and guarded enough that Hitchcock himself in 1958 had to use a model instead of the real location).

This is one case where someone could re-edit it and have something of a minor gem, with high points making it worth the effort. As it is, the speed bumps are nearly fatal.