The Cruel Tower

This popped up on my YouTube, because I like older movies. I knew nothing about the plot before watching it. This movie is fine if you have insomnia and are trying...to go...to sleep...!

It was mildly interesting for the first 15 minutes or so, but the characters were almost caricatures of themselves. One-dimensional. Very little drama, although there were some interesting camera angles of the tower which threatened vertigo.

However, when one of the characters, Joshua--apparently not playing with a full deck--advised the drifter (John Ericson), "Get out now, while you still can!!", I took his advice, and bailed out of the movie right then and there. Good advice-- saved me some time!

I must admit...this is the only film I've ever seen about steeplejacks. These are folks who make a living climbing very high structures in order to fix or service them...such as water towers.

When the story begins, Tom (John Ericson) is hitching a ride on a boxcar. However, the other three beat him up, steal his wallet and toss him off the train car! Nice guys, huh? Well, Tom is badly injured and is soon discovered by Joss and taken back to be cared for by Mary and Stretch (Charles McGraw). Days pass and soon Tom is hired by Stretch to be on his steeplejack crew. But unfortunately, guys in Stretch's crew keep having accidents...which leads you to wonder what is really going on here.

This is only a fair time-passer....mostly because the script isn't all that interesting and seems inspired by many previous films. It's not terrible but it's one that seems very ordinary, at best.

I didn't go into this expecting a good story or good acting. I thought a movie with Mari Blanchard would have a lot of va va voom camp. She is wasted. Strictly for John Erickson fans. He shows off his great body and complete lack of talent.

The plot is a bore.

Drifter John Ericson picks up a job with Charles McGraw's crew of steeplejacks: Steve Brody, Alan Hale Jr, and Peter Whitney. There's also McGraw's girl,, Mari Blanchard, for whom he falls hard, and her loyalty waves. When McGraw finds himself losing control, people beginning dying in accidents. Is it the dangerous job, or is McGraw a madman?

It's not a great movie, with a story told many times, and director Lew Landers is not the man to get anything extra out of it, but as usual, McGraw gives a performance that is great, and Ernest Haller's neck-craning shots of the high towers induces a sense of vertigo. The result is a pretty good programmer.

The Cruel Tower (1956)

** (out of 4)

Often told tale of a drifter (John Ericson) who picks up work with a skyscraper crew but quickly falls in love with a girl (Mari Blanchard), which doesn't sit too well with her boyfriend (Charles McGraw) who just happens to be a crazy psycho. This is basically a low-budget remake of a group of films (TIGER SHARK, SLIM, MANPOWER) that were made at Warner Brothers and they did the story much better justice. Whereas those films dealt with power wires, this one here changes the setting to hundreds of feet up in the air and director Lew Landers really gets to do some magic with this. Some of the best moments in the film deal with people dangling off this high spaces or either falling. It appears the director really enjoyed these scenes and he managed to make them feel quite tense and at times you too feel as if you're falling. I really enjoyed the cinematography during the scenes with people falling as the camera perfectly captured the violence of the fall and i was surprised at some of the sound effects used for the bodies hitting. Considering this was 1956, the violence is a little bit stronger than you might effect. The biggest problem with the film is that we've simply seen this type of story way too many times and there's really nothing fresh or new done with it here. The performances by the three leads are enjoyable enough as they each fit their roles just fine. The screenplay isn't all that original and there's a tad bit too much hatred between rival workers to be believable. I mean, these guys all want to kill one another, which is a tad bit too far fetched to really work. Still, fans of "B" movies might want to check it out but others will probably want to stay clear.