Ódio que não Perdoa

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.

I expected "Sleeping with the Enemy" but this wasn't it. The tension wasn't there. I just wasn't afraid for the good guys or scared of the bad guy. I had hoped that the bottomless pit shown in the opening scene would play a bigger part, but it didn't - and it would have made a grand finale! But the ending was very disappointing!

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.

Make Haste to Live showed me once again what an inexhaustible source of good movies Classic Hollywood was. I've seen many but there's always another one and the treasure chest seems to have no bottom. This is a small film, in black and white but with a wider format than the traditional one. It was produced and directed for Republic Pictures by William Seiter based on a script by Warren Duff. It is a noir story, set in a small town in the State of New Mexico where life is peaceful and predictable. There, in the local newspaper works as an editor Crystal Benson (Dorothy McGuire) a supposed widow with her daughter Randy (Mary Murphy) of 18 years who is about to graduate from high school. But at night, she has nightmares, because the past is about to take its revenge. In reality Randy's father was a gang member named Steve (Steven McNally) who has just left prison after a long sentence for the supposed murder of his wife Zena. In reality, Zena has changed her name and is now Crystal, and when she ran away from her husband, she was pregnant and not thinking clearly. Her friend Rose (Carolyn Jones, the famous Morticia of the Addams Family) tried to explain Zena's situation but was not convincing and, faced with the doubt and the unidentified corpse that implicated Steve, the latter ended up being sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In the town, the sheriff is Edgar Buchanan, an actor who played countless supporting roles in westerns and other genres. And we also meet Crystal's long-suffering suitor, Josh, played by another efficient B-movie actor, John Howard, a former pilot during the Second World War and now a scholar of the labyrinthine dwellings built by the Indians who inhabited the region, the Pueblo tribe.

Things will get heated in this interesting thriller in which I will not fail to praise the exceptional performance of the two main characters, Dorothy McGuire and Stephen McNally. Every time they are together, and luckily it is a big part of the film, the level of tension and drama rises. She appears calm but is actually desperate and he is perversely threatening like a volcano about to erupt. It is worth seeing them act.

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.