Ultime sursis

The plot for "Make Haste to Live" had promise...but ultimately the film made little sense and this annoyed me. It really could have been a good film.

Crystal Benson was married to a violent mobster, Steve (Stephen McNally). He slapped the snot out of her and she was naturally afraid of him. Ultimately, she escaped and the law thought that he'd killed her and disposed of the body. So, even without a corpse, he was convicted and spent 18 years in prison. Now, he's out...and looking to exact his revenge on her...now that he's found her.

While this sounds like a great plot, somehow the writing was not up to snuff. When Steve shows up in the small New Mexico town where she lives, she doesn't tell anyone who his is nor that he's threatening to kill her. Instead, inexplicably, he passes him off as her brother...and allows him to hang around her and her daughter....a young lady who doesn't know that her 'uncle' is actually her horrible father. Why doesn't Crystal tell EVERYONE he's out to kill her, he's a mobster AND why she ran?! This just doesn't make sense and the film became tedious...tedious because the solution to the problem seems simple yet the heroine seems inexplicably dim.

Make Haste to Live is directed by William A. Seiter and adapted to screenplay by Warren B. Duff from the novel written by Gordon and Mildred Gordon. It stars Dorothy McGuire, Stephen McNally, Mary Murphy and Edgar Buchanan. Music is by Elmer Bernstein and cinematography by John L. Russell.

A gangster is sentenced to prison for killing his wife, but she isn't dead, she's alive and well and raising her daughter in New Mexico. It's now 18 years later and he's out of the big house; and he wants revenge!

Elmer Bernstein's superb musical score opens up the picture and Russell uses film noir filters to photograph the gripping opening sequences. It's a handsome beginning, the promise of a film noir gem is palpable, sadly the entire middle hour is plodding in pacing and ridiculous in plotting. There's some neat touches, McNally is permanently angry and sinister, which makes for good fun, McGuire works hard to maintain interest, Buchanan's gruff sheriff steps outside of the norm and the odd scene, such as that involving a fairground, have noirish leanings. The finale as well is of high quality, but patience is tested throughout and there's the over riding feeling that the cast, Bernstein, Russell and the audience deserve a far better script. 5/10

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.

The spooky opening sequence piques our appetite for Make Haste to Live. A sinister stranger looms in the bedroom where Dorothy McGuire tosses in restive sleep. The editor of a small-town newspaper in the New Mexico desert, she's being stalked by her husband, a gangster just released from the pen for murder -- HER murder. Seems that years before, in Chicago, a woman was killed in an rigged explosion; when the body was identified as hers, McGuire packed up and started a new life.

But having set up this intriguing situation, Make Haste to Live loses its way and ends up a muddled mess. When the husband (Steven McNally) insinuates himself into the household of McGuire and their teenage daughter, he's passed off as a black-sheep brother. And credulity gets strained way past the snapping point. McGuire flip-flops between resourceful adversary and the most feckless of battered wives; at times the two roil with hatred for one another but at others a light flirtatiousness enters their interactions. Any valid psychology in this, however, isn't worked out in dramatic terms; we get no sense of the hold McNally has over his wife, only that he wants to kill her and she seems willing to die.

A Bottomless Pit in an old Indian pueblo makes an early appearance but doesn't end up playing the role we come to expect it will; so the final resolution is contrived, coming not out of character but out of the blue. Moseying along from one thing to another, Make Haste to Live has no urgent destination in mind.

Dorothy McGuire gives a strong performance in "Make Haste to Live" from 1954.

McGuire plays Crystal Benson, who runs the newspaper in a small Colorado town. She has a beau, Josh (John Howard) and a daughter Randy (Mary Murphy). When Randy reports that she met a man who said she reminded him of her mother, Crystal panics. She gets a gun from the sherriff's office, hands Randy's boyfriend $1000 to keep safe for her, and makes a recording explaining the situation to her daughter.

It turns out Crystal was married to a vicious criminal, Steve (Stephen McNally) who was accused of killing someone. Crystal, with the help of a good friend, Mary (a blond Carolyn Jones) escapes from him. Later on she finds out that Steve brought a woman home, and the house blew up. Police believed it was Crystal, and while cleared of the first murder, he went to prison for one he didn't commit.

Nineteen years have passed, and Steve has shown up, realizing Randy is his daughter. He befriends Randy, and Crystal passes him off as her brother. Meanwhile, she's desperate to escape again.

Someone posted on IMDb that panning a Dorothy McGuire movie is like applauding the person who killed Bambi's mother, but I must say, this is lousy. First of all, Steve meets Randy and she reminds him of her mother? In what universe?

Also you just want to throttle the McGuire character. Why not just tell everyone he's no good and have the sherriff and her boyfriend pressure him to get out of town? Or tell Randy the truth - so her father is a psychopath, that doesn't make her one.

Not only that, we're shown something in the beginning that we assume (wrongly) will play into the final denoument. It doesn't. That makes the whole thing contrived.

I saw Dorothy McGuire on stage in Night of the Iguana. A wonderful actress. Skip this.