Make Haste to Live

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.

I didn't really understand what the ex-con ex-husband "had" on the main character and what he was trying to do to her and her daughter. I did like the small Western town setting with the Indian Ruins excavation site and the idea of her attempting to escape via the chartered plane, the suspense and down-to-the-wire excitement. And the villain was a menacing character.

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.

Eighteen years ago, Dorothy McGuire was married to Stephen McNally, who turned out to be a very bad man. After he had beaten a murder rap and he had hit her, she ran away. By happenstance, a different woman was blown up in their home, he was convicted of murdering Miss McGuire - apparently the corpse was in teeny-tiny pieces - and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Miss McGuire moved to a small town in the desert, raised their daughter to become Mary Murphy, and publish and edit the local paper. Now, however, McNally has gotten out of prison. He's tracked her down and intends to punish her.

I can't really blame him. She couldn't have sent a picture of herself holding a current newspaper?

Despite this and other holes in the plot, this is a very entertaining movie, half soap opera, half crime drama, with some very engaging performances among the leads, and Edgar Buchanan just right as the canny local sheriff. William A. Seiter's last movie as director is no world-beater because of the plot holes, but John Russell's camerawork around Taos, New Mexico, and an early Elmer Bernstein score help to burnish this movie into a pretty good one.

The best part is the first : one does not know why Dorothy macGuire awakes in fear at night,why she's so frightened,why she entrusts a hefty sum of money to someone she can depend on; when one learns the reason why ,it's a little disappointing and derivative ; the screenplay does not make any sense and Stephen McNally's - although ideally cast as the villain- motives are not clearly defined ; for good measure ,there's even a love rivalry a la "imitation of life" between mother and daughter,which is rather ludicrous ,in this case!

The use of the Indian excavations ,particularly the funeral chamber , redeems somewhat the movie in the last scenes .A good beginning and a suspenseful ending ,you make it on the percentages ,but lose out on the bonuses: average.