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.

Policeman (Edmond O'Brien) hunts down the hulking brute (Raymond Burr) who kidnapped his teenage daughter (Natalie Wood). Had potential to be a sleazy thriller but doesn't live up to it. As for the acting, the special of the day is ham. Raymond Burr channeling Lenny from "Of Mice and Men" will elicit laughter from most viewers. Carol Veazie as his trashy mom is fun to watch. Overweight Edmond O'Brien's turn as the hot-headed thuggish overprotective father is impossible to stop watching. Seems like every scene he has he's grabbing someone and yelling at them. It's not good acting but the movie is much more intriguing when he's on screen. Brian Donlevy spends most of the movie telling his pal O'Brien to go home. For her part, Natalie Wood is lovely to look at and handles herself fine in a weak role. Herb Vigran is good as the comic relief desk sergeant. Somewhat interesting for its glimpse at 1950s' attitudes towards sex, parenting, and mental illness. Ultimately can't be taken seriously enough to work as a thriller and it's not quite over-the-top enough to work as camp. Watchable but nothing special.

This little-known sordid shocker played as part of a Natalie Wood homage on TCM. The action is set in Los Angeles, "although it could be any city, your city", intones the voice-over. Yeah, right. Natalie, 18, is abducted from lovers' lane by a voyeur-psycho (Raymond Burr) who slugs her beau (Richard Anderson) and absconds with his car. Her father (Edmond O'Brien) is a police captain who happens to be a sexist, macho, insensitive, over-protective, overbearing, filthy, repulsive S.O.B. and probably a Republican to boot. He is neglectful to his wife and has shouted down his sister into the life of a sterile old maid - a plan he seems to be enacting again with his daughter. He would probably also be a homophobe if he had any notion that such a thing as homosexuals even existed.

The details of police procedure are laughable. The slugged-out beau gets first mistaken for a drunk and put in the drunk tank. When a doctor intervenes and diagnoses a concussion, his story checks out but he still has to contend with the captain's brutality, fatherly possessiveness and attempts at psychological castration.

Meanwhile, through another coincidence, the police stumbles on the abductor's mother - an even more unhealthy version, although living, than "Psychos"'s dead and embalmed mama, which leads to a break in the case. We are asked to believe that those cops - who don't have the slightest element of psychology or know how to raise their own children - immediately associate a missing 32-year-old male living with his possessive mother with a potential sexual psycho who is probably the abductor. They turn out to be right.

Given what Natalie has to put up with at home, one has to wonder if she wouldn't be better off with her abductor for understanding and comfort. She limps through half the movie in a torn-up skirt, thus fulfilling the obligatory prurient cheesecake element for a film of that genre, budget and period.

The climax takes place in a brickworks factory, the dirt and slime being a fitting visual complement to what goes on in the male characters' minds.

David Buttolph's incidental music tries hard to make this sound like "Rebel Without A Cause" but is too generic to make a mark.

The film as a whole is a priceless - if laughable - time capsule of attitudes towards crime, sex, cops, victims, perpetrators and anything and anyone that is slightly out of the ordinary. It's enough to turn any "Momma's boy" into a "pinko commie" or a "psycho"...

Policeman's daughter, out on Lovers' Loop late one night with her secret boyfriend, is kidnapped by a somewhat simple-minded behemoth with a mommy-complex. Curiously old-fashioned and corny bit of police business masquerading as a gritty noir (and advertised as a juvenile delinquent flick: "18...A nice girl...How did she fall so far?"). As the lonely, tormented abductor, Raymond Burr actually manages a thoughtful performance, however this case is wrapped up so quickly (with the movie clocking in at a scant 75 minutes) that neither Burr nor victim Natalie Wood has a chance at carving out a three-dimensional character. Wood, who faints from a slap across the face, is made to be the stereotypical weak female, while over-protective father Edmond O'Brien and police captain Brian Donlevy overact mercilessly. Poor screenplay, by David Dortort--adapting a book by Whit Masterson, the uncredited "All Through the Night"--doesn't seem to know much about police procedures or personalities, and the sequences set at the station are hopelessly mediocre (what with an eyeball-rolling desk sergeant and a hilariously overeager police psychiatrist). Though distributed by Warner Bros., this doesn't have the solid production values usually associated with the studio; it feels cheap and under-populated, like an early episode of "Dragnet", with only Burr's forceful work and a decent climax putting it above typical television fare. ** from ****

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.