Un cri dans la nuit

A brilliant performance by Raymond Burr as a mentally-challenged man who feels stifled by his mother makes "A Cry in the Night" a good watch. The film also stars Brian Donlevy and Edmund O'Brien.

Natalie Wood plays Elizabeth, the teenaged daughter of police Captain Taggart (O'Brien) involved with Owen (Anderson) - the two of them are together in a lovers' lane when Owen sees someone watching them. He gives chase and gets knocked out for his trouble. The voyeur, Harold Loftus (Burr) kidnaps Elizabeth.

Anyone who's watched the news or the ID channel knows that as kidnappings go, this was pretty benign. We also know a little bit more about how to handle a kidnapper - Elizabeth finally catches on and tries to befriend him. Meanwhile, her hot-tempered father is frantically looking for her and comes up against Harold's overprotective mother (Carol Veazie).

Burr is just the saddest character in this, it's heartbreaking. Natalie is very pretty and, as we have seen in other films, good at histrionics.

Since it was made in 1956, the film has a few questionable or politically incorrect moments, like when a fellow lovers' lane person hears Elizabeth screams and says, "Slap her again. They like it." And there's the subplot of Taggart's sister still unmarried because her brother broke them up - apparently she didn't care how lousy he was since he was breathing. And Elizabeth's mother tells her husband "not to scare away" the one Elizabeth has on the hook.

Schools today sometimes ban these politically incorrect films - ones that are much more blatant than this. I think it's a great idea for new generations to see them and understand how women were thought of and what was important to them - husbands.

See if for Burr's striking performance.

When Raymond Burr's face (grotesquely lighted by John F. Seitz) looms out of the shrubbery at Lovers' Loop, he adds A Cry in the Night to his long string of films in which he cemented his reputation as the noir cycle's most indispensable and unforgettable creep. He's prowling the petting grounds looking for a girl, and doesn't care how he gets her. Assaulting the male half (Richard Anderson) of a necking couple, he kidnaps the other (Natalie Wood), spiriting her off to a den he's fixed up in an abandoned brickyard. This time, though, there's a catch to Burr's villainy: He's a dim-witted hulk, a childish monster akin to Lennie in Of Mice And Men.

The police mistake the dazed Anderson for a drunk and lock him up. Only when a doctor suspects concussion does his story emerge, leading captain Brian Donleavy to mobilize a dragnet for Wood and her abductor. As it happens, Wood's father (Edmond O'Brien) is one of their own, a hot-headed, rigid cop out for blood - he throws a punch at the already reeling Anderson. Meanwhile Burr plies Wood with apricot pie and sequined gowns, as she desperately tries to flee. A break in the case comes when Burr's mother calls in to report her 32-year-old son missing....

Along with Burr, A Cry in the Night unites stalwarts of the cycle Donleavy and O'Brien; even the familiar voice in the opening narration belongs to Alan Ladd, who appeared in this director Frank Tuttle's This Gun For Hire 14 years earlier. The movie stays a pretty standard police procedural, albeit with a few intriguing touches. It offers as subtexts some period glimpses into dysfunctional parenting. His spinster sister, another victim of his vigilance against beaux come a-couring, accuses the overprotective O'Brien of driving Wood to Lovers' Loop and hence to peril.

Even less wholesome is Carol Veazie as Burr's doting, sweet-toothed mother. Managing simultaneously to suggest Dame Judith Anderson, Jean Stapleton and Doris Roberts, she shuffles around drinking coffee in her horse-blanket bathrobe, whining about that missing slice of apricot pie. Nineteen-fifty-six, some may recall, was the high-water mark of a national panic about `Momism,' a threat deemed scarcely less perilous to the republic than the international Communist conspiracy; Veazie endures as one of its most formidable operatives (her successors would include the unseen Mrs. Bates in Psycho, Angela Lansbury's Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate, and Marjorie Bennet's Dehlia Flagg in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?).

Early in the movie, before the tight walls of his world come tumbling down, O'Brien pours himself a beer and waits for the nightly movie on TV. When it starts, he sighs, `Another one of those cop pictures,' and switches it off. There he was, in the Indian Summer of the noir cycle, and couldn't care less. Couldn't he have forseen that, almost 50 years later, there would be an avid audience for those cop pictures - even the ones starring him?

Edmond O'Brien gets to chew the scenery as a desperate police captain on the hunt for a blubbering, wallowing, cretinous pervert/Peeping Tom/kidnapper played by Raymond Burr, in one of his last roles before starting work on "Perry Mason." The kidnapper played by Burr has snatched O'Brien's daughter, played by Natalie Wood, from a tryst on Lover's Lane with a car salesman played by Richard Anderson, who was later to play Oscar Goldman in "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "The Bionic Woman." You can see the ending a million miles away, but the point isn't the plot as much as the B-movie feel and the often unintentionally hilarious line readings, characters, and themes. The film is a mediocre example of a kind of morality play that frequented American film-making in the 1950s, with a stern father with an explosive temper -- O'Brien -- ruling with an iron fist over a household that on the surface seems perfect but which of course has shadows lurking within, complete with a simpering wife and a dark (but not that dark) secret that gets revealed at the end, and with ham-handed references to sub-Freudian psychological motivations for the kidnapper's brutish behavior. Natalie Woods looks and acts every bit the part of a quivering, naive 18-year-old fifties débutante, in a role that would have had Elizabeth Taylor finding a way to scratch the kidnapper's eyes out. O'Brien is the prototypical cop who can't leave his work at home and spends most of the movie haranguing his hapless night supervisor and browbeating his daughter's boyfriend. Anderson doesn't really look the part of a young boyfriend, but then again, Natalie Wood was dating Raymond Burr behind the scenes while the film was being shot. The ending is abrupt and pat.

Alan Ladd's Jaguar Productions made this film for Warner Brothers and Ladd made sure a lot of friends got work here. A quick glance of the credits will show that almost the whole cast worked with Ladd at some point in their careers. And in a prominent role as the boyfriend of Natalie Wood is Richard Anderson who was at one time Ladd's stepson-in-law being married to Sue Carol Ladd's daughter by a former marriage. Alan Ladd always liked having familiar faces and friends working with or for him.

A Cry In The Night is about a cop's daughter being kidnapped by a deranged peeping Tom in a lover's lane. Natalie Wood is the daughter and Raymond Burr is the kidnapper and he slugs Richard Anderson and steals his car as well as Natalie in his getaway.

The curious thing about A Cry In The Night is that both victim and perpetrator have serious parent issues. Wood is the daughter of an overprotective father who happens to be a police captain played by Edmond O'Brien. Burr's bad luck to kidnap a cop's daughter because the whole police force of the town is after him now, working 24/7. She's afraid to bring Anderson home to meet the folks because no one is good enough for daddy's little girl.

But that's nothing compared to what Burr is dealing with with Mumzie Dearest played by Carol Veazie. An overprotective mother has left Burr with social problems, an inability to relate to the opposite sex. At times Burr exudes menace and at times and sometimes the same time Burr is so childlike he's pitiable. No doubt Burr's character was inspired by Lennie from Of Mice And Men. In fact I'm surprised Raymond Burr never considered doing a remake of that John Steinbeck classic. He would have been wonderful in the part. When he's on screen Burr steals the film and when he's off you're waiting to see him return.

At the time the film was being made Raymond Burr and Natalie Wood were on some studio arranged dates. Very arranged because after his death we learned that Raymond Burr was a closeted gay man. Natalie Wood found that out earlier than most of us, but in a recent biography she said that she enjoyed Burr's company.

Brian Donlevy has the role of the no nonsense police captain overseeing the manhunt. A Cry In The Night holds up well after over 50 years and could use a remake today. If it was remade, who would you cast?

Seeing Raymond Burr as a quirky psychotic takes some getting used to after years as ultra- respectable Perry Mason. Still, he does well in the role, his bulky frame and sad eyes perfect for an overgrown mama's boy. Since Harold (Burr) can't have a normal romantic relationship, he hides in a lover's lane to watch others. Except one night, he panics and kidnaps young Elizabeth (Wood). Now the cops (Donlevy and O'Brien) need to find them before he panics some more.

Actually, the film is about that favorite teen topic of the mid-1950's—bad parenting, e.g. Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Note how loony Harold's problems are blamed on an overbearing mom (Veazie). At the same time, Elizabeth's ducking around lover's lanes is blamed on an over-protective dad (O'Brien), while spinster sister Madge (Lawrence) stands as an older version of what Liz will become thanks to Dad. Both parents' fears appear based on keeping offspring away from the opposite sex, another hot topic of the time. Note too how the script makes clear from the beginning how Liz and her beau Owen (Anderson) are headed for marriage, which makes their petting acceptable to the mores of the time.

The movie itself is an okay suspenser, more like a TV play than a feature film. Still, it's a first- rate cast, including those two old pro's Donlevy and O'Brien, while director Tuttle keeps things moving. Had the movie been made a few years earlier, I suspect its noirish overtones would have replaced teen angst with full-fledged noir.