The Desperate Hours (1955).

I'm pretty sure we no longer live in an age of cinema icons.  If we do, then it's even odds that what we've got now is by no means the same thing.  I'm also willing to bet the matinee stars of an older era wouldn't have much of a clue of what to think about our penchant for making trolls like Justin Kjellberg into internet darlings.  They at least had the luxury of living in an analog age.  Back then, none of them had to deal with the level of exposure that we unleash on the people we choose to entertain us today.  I know it's possible to claim that the Golden Age of the Hollywood Star is over for one simple reason.  Most of the names I'm thinking of who fit that title are now almost lost to time.  It seems like just a handful of artists from that era have been able to maintain anything like a genuine pop culture legacy for themselves.  Chief among them are guys like Groucho Marx, John Wayne, or Alfred Hitchcock.  There's another one in that bunch who, as of this writing, is still able to hold an admirable spot somewhere just above 50% in terms of audience awareness and acclaim.  His name is Humphrey Bogart, and unlike a lot of stage names that sound made up, it turns out this was the actual moniker his parents christened him with at birth.  It's kind of a miracle that his legacy has hung around for this long, yet when you look at some of the films he starred in, then even today, it remains just possible to see why a guy like him could become an immortal.

In order to figure out why and how that happened, we still need to back track just a bit.  I think the words of an old documentary (made by the same producer who would give us Gene Wilder in a Chocolate Factory, no less) said it all best.  "Humphrey Bogart brought an unmistakable power and excitement to the screen".  He was the kind of actor who could convey "an innate sense of world-weary toughness", while also suggesting that "underneath lay an innate tenderness".  Another way to put it is to say that Bogart greatest calling card as an actor wasn't just that he was good at playing tough customers.  He was more like an originator of a by now familiar staple: the Tough Guy as this fundamentally Haunted Soul.  As a result, while he is by no means the singular architect of this modern archetype (its origins extend all the way back to the printed page, anyway), there is a sense in which his best work showcases the birth pangs of the kind of protagonist, or anti-hero that Martin Scorsese has gone on to make pretty much the subject of almost every single roll of film he's used.  Bogie was good at being the Lonely Everyman Outcast.  The lug with a surprising amount of hidden depths, and enough demons contained within always ready to stifle and drag his better angels off into the shadows.  To give an idea of what I mean, has anybody seen that one time De Niro directed an actual film?  It was called A Bronx Tale.  Let's just say that Bogie would have been a good fit for the role of Sonny the mobster.

"On the screen and off, Humphrey Bogart had a style that set him apart from his fellow actors".  In truth, though, this seems to have been a talent that he had to work his way towards one grueling role of work at a time.  Like pretty much all of the great artists, there was no easy entrance waiting for him somewhere.  Bogie came to Tinseltown in it's Golden Age a complete nobody, and pretty much had to beg producers and directors to give him even a bit part in whatever project would take him on.  Before that, however, things were almost kind of amusing.  There's a sense in which he was the product of the kind of Big Apple that Scorsese knew and "wrote" about his whole life, just not exactly in the way you might think.  Based on his screen persona alone, you'd probably figure here's this guy whose grown up dirt poor in some flophouse tenement located somewhere in a piece of detritus that used to be known as the Five Points.  It's where he first learned all of life's hard knocks, and how to defend himself against whatever anybody decides to throw at him, to the point where a lot of the bullies cross the street whenever they saw him coming.  Maybe he finds refuge in Broadway's theater district, both as a good place to play hooky in and catch some shut-eye, and as a good way for him to keep out of trouble.

The only catch is, the more this young punk from nowhere hangs out in the aisles, the more the acting bug begins to take a hold of him, and soon that's where it all got started, right?  Well, no, not really.  Not at all in fact.  "Born in New York, in 1899, on Christmas Day.  Humphrey Deforest Bogart is the son of a prominent surgeon.  The screen's future Tough Guy is raised among the cultured and genteel upper middle class.  Bogart's mother, Maude, is a famous commercial artist.  And her baby, Humphrey, is her favorite model.  Her portrait of Bogart at the age of one is widely circulated throughout the nation, and will bring him his first taste of fame.  Over the years, as a commercial model, little Humphrey Bogart gazes angelically from the pages of national magazines, in advertisements for a popular baby food".  So in other words, as strange as it may seem, when we talk about the childhood of Philip Marlowe, we need to get the idea of Mean Streets out of our heads (as difficult as that is to do) and think way more along the lines of The Age of Innocence (Scorsese also claimed that was his most violent picture, for whatever it's worth).  It's the kind of thing you're just not prone to expect from someone like Bogie.

From the look of things, the young punk must have felt the same way soon enough. "By the time he's 18, Bogart rebels against his sheltered home life, and joins the Navy during World War I.  After the War, at 21, Humphrey Bogart decides to become an actor because, he says, "I was born to be indolent, and this was the softest of rackets".  It's the kind of statement which makes me wonder if maybe the punk found out his own ways of getting into trouble even before he joined the Armed Forces,  Whatever the case, the rest of pretty straightforward.  "During the 1920s, on Broadway, Bogart usually plays the romantic juvenile in drawing room comedies.  And reportedly is the first actor to utter the immortal line, "Tennis, anyone"?  Bogart fails to achieve stardom on the stage, and in private life he fails in two short-lived marriages.  But in the midst of these discouraging years on Broadway, he appears as a "lady killer" in his first film in 1929, and starring Ruth Eddings.  It's only an 8 minute Vitaphone short, and like most trivia of it's kind, it soon winds up in studio vaults, forgotten even by film historians.  But this one reeler marks the beginning of one of the great careers in motion pictures.  Hollywood in the early 30s is in the midst of transition to sound pictures.  And many Broadway actors like Humphrey Bogart get a chance in "Talkies".  Bogart, however, is given dreary roles in nearly a dozen minor "epics" like Three on a Match.  Bogart is a flop in Hollywood, and the studios write him off as just another mediocre actor.

"Returning to New York, Bogart finally lands a talked about part in a hit play, The Petrified Forest.  (It's a) part that Hollywood wants Edward G. Robinson to recreate on the screen.  But the play's star, Leslie Howard, refuses to appear in the picture unless his friend Humphrey Bogart can again play the role of Duke Mantee.  Knowing that this is his last chance for success in Hollywood, Bogart will perform with a vengeance".  It turned out to be the role that helped define his cinematic persona in various ways from then on.  In that film, the protagonist declares Bogie's character as "the last of the rugged individualists".  It's one of those lines that almost ends up sounding fated in retrospect.  "Overnight, Bogart has become a sensation, but not a star.  He is assigned as merely a supporting player, the sinister heavy.  And the top salaried stars at Warner Bros., James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson will bump him off in picture after picture.  Bogart takes this kind of fate philosophically.  He says, "The Heavy, full of crime and bitterness, grabs his wounds and talks about death.  The audience is his, and his alone".  Bogart becomes a master at delivering these farewell addresses".  A typical example of such parting wit goes as follows.  "Do me a favor, will ya?  Don't tell them a dame tripped me up".

"Bogart regards most of his films as mediocre affairs.  A proud and sensitive man, he now wants to become a serious actor.  But he finds himself acting futilely in roles far beneath his talent...Bogart says the only reason for making money is so you can tell some bigshot to go to hell.  And he publicly calls one studio boss "A creep".  But in 1941, Bogart finally gets what he wants from his studio.  A starring role, in a first class film, The Maltese Falcon.  Directed by his friend, John Huston, and aided by Sidney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Mary Astor, Bogart breaths fire into the role of Sam Spade; a cynical, amoral private eye.  This is the turning point in Bogart's career.  Through the sheer force of his talent he has proven that he is not merely an actor.  After all these years, he has become a star (web)".  There really wasn't much in the way of looking back after that.  Bogie would go on to parlay his natural talents as a thespian in what are now considered to be some of the greatest films ever made.  His is a roster that includes Casablanca, The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not (that's picture where Bogie met and lost his heart to a his co-star, a girl named Lauren Bacall), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and The Caine Mutiny.  That's a lot of accolades to rack up for oneself in such a short span of a lifetime.  Somehow, Bogart managed to take it all in stride, and was able to create an indelible image in the process.

The film I want to look at today comes from the very tail end of his career.  There's a bit of an almost humorous irony to it as well.  One of his earliest pictures features a subplot with a surprising enough amount of similarities to the picture I have in mind now.  It's a thriller called The Desperate Hours.

The Story.

We apologize for the interruption of our regularly scheduled program at this time.  A bulletin has just come over the wire, and the following is a public service announcement.  Indianapolis state police have informed us of a successful prisonbreak that was made earlier today in the neighboring Terre Haute Correctional Facility.  At approximately 5:21 AM, a riot was staged by the inmates of the jail.  The ensuing ruckus was of such a quality that Warden Swope was forced to call in the local police force for assistance.  The call was heard, and law enforcement was able to respond in record time.  Their efforts were able to quell the riot. In addition, however, at least three Terre Haute County inmates are known to have made a getaway during the ensuing melee.  The names of the convicts are as follows.  Police suspect Glenn (Bogart) and Hal Griffin (Dewey Martin), and their accomplice Samuel Kobish (Robert Middleton) to be on the loose and at large.  Officers say that residents of Northside and it's neighboring counties should remain on the alert, and to contact your local law enforcement if you should see any person or persons who match their description.  The Griffin Brothers have managed to make themselves something of a pair of legends here in the Crossroads of America.  The older brother Glenn has even garnered the reputation of the Clyde Barrow of the Midwest.  Kobish, meanwhile, is another story.

This man is to be considered armed and dangerous.  If you should see him, do not confront him.  Find or tell your nearest police and let them handle the situation.  Kobish is now wanted in and around the Marion area and surrounding neighborhoods for a number of spree killings.  He is known to have a violent temper, and is not afraid to resort to it as his first choice.  It is unknown how this man wound up an accomplice to Griffin and his brother, however, his addition makes the group an especially lethal threat, and citizens are warned to keep their distance.  This man just doesn't care...Ladies and gentlemen, we have just now received another bulletin as this situation has developed.  It is believed that the Griffin Brothers and Kobish might have taken shelter in a residential neighborhood located somewhere in Indianapolis's Northside.  This report remains unconfirmed at this time, however, the discovery of local sanitary worker George Patterson (Walter Baldwin) by the side of a road located just near Haute has been cited by officers on the scene as proof that the escapees must be nearby.  Sherriff Ronald Masters (Ray Collins) and Special Agent David Carson (Whit Bissell) have advised that Northside residents be on the alert for these criminals, and to remember, these men just don't care.

Conclusion: A Fitting Swan Song.

Once again we find ourselves taking a stroll through the familiar, dark alleyways of Film Noir.  Another quick look at Google Trends shows that this genre currently sits somewhere at about 75% in terms of popularity.  That's pretty damned remarkable once you consider we're talking about a sub-group of books and films that are all more than half a century old.  The vast majority of what we now think of as the kind of Classic Noir output was all made in a time and place where computers, cell phones, and digital tech in general were all the stuff of Sci-Fi magazines and comic books.  Not a single car back then was power by electricity, and the idea of streaming media wouldn't exist as a concept in the mind of even the most forward thinking technophiles.  The world that Film Noir grants us a look into is best summed up as any time or place that can be considered out of joint.  The settings for most stories of this kind are ostensibly meant as familiar, everyday surroundings.  They'll take place in your average office building, the local nearby bar, the police headquarters.  The most common environment for this type of narrative, however, was the Street.  It was Noir that seems to have struck on the realization that the idea of the modern, mid 20th century, urban City was capable of having all kinds of dramatic capabilities contained within it.  An average work in this sub-genre will make the City its very own character.

If the City and the Street are two of the defining features of the modern Crime Drama, then the very nature of this format points to something very like a perfect irony as one of it's key defining traits.  For a genre that is often lauded for giving viewers a picture of "Life As it Is", the Crime Thriller owes it's entire existence more to the realm of folklore than of fact.  This is something that wasn't lost on critics like Paul Meehan.  In his study Horror Noir, Meehan notes that "The macabre has been an element of the mystery story since the inception of the genre. Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” first published in 1841, is considered the first example of detective fiction. Poe’s eccentric sleuth M. Auguste Dupin cracks a multiple murder case in which the perpetrator turns out to be a homicidal ape. Arthur Conan Doyle’s most memorable Sherlock Holmes adventure is surely his 1901 novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, in which Holmes squares off against a phantom hound and a ghostly family curse. The Victorian writer Wilkie Collins incorporated the trappings of the supernatural into his seminal detective novels The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). All of these writers (and Poe in particular) are also known for their horror fiction.

"Morbidity has always been a prime feature of detective/mystery fiction, where ghastly murders and dire plans constitute the soul of the plot. The noir fiction of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich and Raymond Chandler, although realistic in nature, is populated with characters who are monstrous grotesques. The gross Fat Man and the oily, effeminate Joel Cairo in Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon (played by Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre in John Huston’s 1941 film version), are cases in point.   The obsessive quest of these human monsters for the titular avian talisman has a touch of gothic horror. Similarly, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novel Farewell, My Lovely exhibits a cast of similarly grotesque characters, including the Frankenstein-like Moose Malloy, the mysterious phony psychic Jules Amthor and his sinister American Indian henchman. The psychotic killer in Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi disguises his crimes as the grisly work of an escaped leopard (3-4)".  Much like you're typical work of Fantasy, the Noir demands that its settings take on this heightened quality that is able to make it stand out from the confines of ordinary reality.  Yes, the main stage of the Noir drama is the regular type of settings that all of us recognize and live in on a daily basis.

However, the predominant artistic effect that this kind of story strives for is one where the very buildings seem to tilt at odd angles.  The streetlamps can't just help cast illumination at night like they do in real life.  Instead, it's as if each one of them serves as disembodied pools of light in an otherwise black, universal void.  Doorways and entrances to back alleys or basements must always look less like typical places of egress, and instead contain subtle hints that they are all portals to some grim underworld.  The entire city must be made to seem as if they're looming over the hapless protagonist like a fly caught in an urban spider's web.  The very image itself is nothing new.  It's a topos that can trace its lineage back all the way to Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, with it's heroine having to navigate her way through old, dark, labyrinthine hallways with the possibility of a ghost or two just around the next corner, waiting to rattle it's chains at the audience.  All that the development of Noir did was to tone down the Supernatural element (except for all the other times when it doesn't) and trade in the Castles Hallways for Mean Streets where crime or something worse lurks around every corner.

The one possible element of originality the format has going for it might stem from its precise point of historical origin.  Films and books about Gangsters, Criminals, and Detectives had existed even before the date of Dec. 7th, 1941.  However, the genre never really began to find its footing until just about or not long after Sept. 2nd, 1945.  The close of World War II seems to have marked a turning point in Noir's career.  It turns out to have been one of those historical flashpoints that was strong enough to leave its mark on the Gothic offshoot in such as way as to become a crucial part of its aesthetic identity.  "If you go back and look over the plots of Film Noir, you discover that more than a quarter of the total films have protagonists who identify themselves as war vets.  And what he discovers when he comes back from the war is not a secure place in society, but rather quite the opposite...One sees it, in a sense, as the continuing experience of wartime trauma in a domestic situation (web)".  This notion of Noir as a reflection of the fallout from war makes for an interesting lens from which to view a film like The Desperate Hours.  This can be seen in the struggle between the film's two main protagonists.

The entire film concerns the fallout that happens when a trio of escaped convicts led by Bogart manage to find a place to hideaway for a time in the house of a seemingly normal suburban family.  The patriarch of the Hilliard clan is played by veteran Golden Age star Frederic March, and once they're on-screen together, the rest of the film is very much a contest between him and Bogie to see just who is the real main character of the story.  Each figure finds themselves involved in a complex cat and mouse game of chess to see what will become of the other.  What's kind of fascinating to note is how much the story's two main leads functions polar mirror images of one another.  This is best demonstrated by considering the worst case scenarios that the criminal and the law-abiding citizen wish to avoid.  At first, it seems like there's no connecting thread between either of them.  Hilliard is concerned about what Griffin and his gang are capable of with his family.  Bogart's character, meanwhile, lays it all out as a simple question of strategic tactical thinking.  All he wants is to sit quietly and wait for some money and a ride out of town to come their way, then he and his friends will be out of their hair.  The twist comes when you stop and realize that both men are trying to protect their respective families.

Glenn Griffin and his younger brother Hank are no one's idea of the Nuclear Family, and so they are both, as the saying goes, pretty much all they have left.  It doesn't take long for the astute viewer to realize that each brother finds themself leaning on the other for support during most of the film's action.  This is somethin that the script by Joseph Haynes is rather smart about.  It's not something the writer is at pains to lay on thick.  He never telegraphs the connection between the Griffin sibs in any kind of big, flashing, neon lights.  Instead, this mirror aspect of the plot is doled out in careful snippets of both actions and dialogue.  It's a cumulative effect that Haynes develops in one patient layer at a time.  It's done well enough to the point that once Griffin the Younger decides he's had enough of his older bro's schemes, and decides to strike out on his own, it doesn't take long for Bogart's character to start a slow mental unraveling that goes a long way toward upping the stakes of the plot.  In that sense, the idea of the story's villain as a inverted, negative reflection of the protagonist has not just narratological sense, but also a great deal of dramatic weight to it.  It helps us get a bit closer to the themes that Haynes and William Wyler, the film's director, are driving at.  Here's where the connection with Film Noir as a reflection of the fallout of war starts to come into play.  It's seen in the way the film treats it's villain.

Here's where a bit of backstage trivia has an effect on how the film handles one of its two competing leads.  The thing to keep in mind about The Desperate Hours is that it started life as a book, rather than as a movie.  Even before then, the idea of a film adaptation might never have got off the ground if Haynes hadn't managed to turn his book into a successful stage play.  It was the acclaim and profits generated from that theater production that got the attention first of Hollywood, and then Will Wyler.  After he signed on to the project, the future director of Ben Hur began to collaborate with Haynes on bringing the novel to the screen.  It means the audience is being treated to one of those cases where the original author gets to mangle his own text.  The good news is that we seem to be dealing with one of those cases where the final product can still be described as a well made translation.  This is one of those films where nothing was really broken about the original novel, so there's no need to fix it.  It's to Wyler's credit in terms of his skills as a reader as well as a filmmaker that he seems to have realized this.  He knew enough about the overall quality of the source material to leave it alone, and let Haynes get on with the important work of translating the text into script pages.  The one major change that wound up happening with the film concerns the age lift that was given to it's main antagonist.

In both the book and stage play, the figure of Glenn Griffin is written as a young man, possibly in his early to mid-20s at the latest.  This is a characterization that was carried over onto the theater stage, where the role was given to a young Paul Newman, in what turned out to be one of his first breakout performances.  It wasn't long after that before Hollywood came knocking, and the future Doc Hudson began a long and respectable career of his own.  When it came time to convert the pages into images, however, Paramount Pictures decided to cast the star of Casablanca as the film's top billed actor.  It makes sense enough in terms of production decisions.  Newman's star was still on the rise, and he wouldn't get his make in the business until he was cast in the role of Fast Eddie Felson in The Hustler a few years later.  Bogie, meanwhile was already something of a cinema legend by this point, and he'd been portraying characters like Glenn Griffin for most of his life.  It was pretty much his bread and butter in the industry.  At the same time, this meant giving a considerable age lift to the character, considering that Bogart was in his mid to late 50s when he signed onto the project.  The interesting thing about this casting choice is in the way it has of reshaping the villain's primary motivation.

In the original book, Griffin is portrayed as this volatile image of the then emerging youth culture.  He may even qualify as a precursor to the Angry Young Man movement in Arts and Letters that would sweep the cultural zeitgeist in the years ahead.  This coding of the character gains considerable weight when it's revealed that a lot of what drives his actions in the literary source material is the way he was treated by his father.  It's implied the patriarch of the Griffin household was always grooming his two sons (whether through his words or his fists) for a life of crime from more or less the very beginning.  As a result, the two siblings have had an abnormal upbringing, with the older brother in particular forming an obsession of somehow getting out from under the shadow of his long departed father.  

The film version, in contrast, offers an interesting sort of picture.  Bogart portrays Griffin as a much older man who always carries around with him the sense of having been beaten down by life in some way that is somewhat defined, yet never explicitly stated.  His young brother Hank was still somewhere in his teens during the course of the novel.  Here, however, it's Henry who is the most likely twenty-something candidate for Angry Young Man.  The difference introduced by the addition of Bogie to the cast means that the idea of a still emerging generational gap is placed on Dewy Martin's shoulders.  You get the sense that had his character lived, he would have wound falling in line with similar screen icons like Marlon Brando and James Dean.  This adds an interesting dimension to Bogart's character arc. 

This older version of Glenn Griffin gives off less the idea of youth corrupted, and more a lifetime's experience that was either wasted, or else was considered incidental and expendable.  It's here that we circle back to the idea of Noir as the generic expression of postwar fallout.  In the case of an example like The Desperate Hours, all it takes is for one simple script adjustment to cast the entire narrative arc of a character in a different light.  This version of the film's villain tends to fit in with the idea of the Noir Veteran.  He's someone who had the best years of his life ripped away from him, and when he returns home from the theater of war, he discovers that whatever sacrifices he might have made doesn't seem to matter all that much for some odd reason.  His efforts are treated less as a noble and praiseworthy endeavor in its own right, or especially for the sake of those he might have helped and rescued.  Instead, all of the blood, sweat, and tears are really little more than an expendable means to yet further crooked ends.  It's a theme that served as one of the perennial staples of the Noir genre.  Something that was utilized all the way up the ladder even by the likes of Alfred Hitchcock himself.  This idea that one of the unacknowledged, yet ever present results of the war was the blurring of lines between ally and foe.  That it could get so you couldn't tell who the good guy was the the bad one.

It's something Hitch explored well, even during the very start and height of the War Years.  Films like Saboteur, Foreign Correspondent, and Notorious function as neat little examinations of how people can find their own personal loyalties switching on a dime, even in the midst of a conflict with such crystal clear demarcations between black and white.  In that case, it isn't so much that time is out of joint, or that morality is away elsewhere on business.  Rather it's that the genre as a whole posits the idea of Modern Humanity as a microcosm that finds itself at odds with the order of things, and what the consequences of such moral decisions can turn out to be.  Applying this rubric to Wyler and Hayne's film grants an added extra dimension not of moral ambiguity, so much as a certain level of elegant complexity.  There's a barely acknowledged, unsolved mystery at the heart of this film, and all of it is centered on the hidden motivations of Bogart's character.  It's like being introduced to a version Rick Blaine from Casablanca years down the road, only to discover that everything seems to have gone wrong for him.  Another way to say it is that Glenn Griffin finds himself caught up in the same dilemma that Kirk Douglas found himself in with Stanley Kubrick's Paths of Glory.  It's a film that Roger Ebert posited as a belated response to Bogart's most famous film, one that reflect the slow creeping sense of postwar disillusionment.  It's something that Kubrick would return in films like Full Metal Jacket.

It could also very well be the same underlying conflict that the elder Griffin finds himself caught up in as he takes a mirror reflection of the kind of life that was ultimately denied him hostage.  If this can be said to be the underlying crisis of the film's villain, then it makes for an interesting contrast when he is compared to March's protagonist.  He's almost the exact opposite of the Noir figure.  Audiences of the time might have referred to him as a "Square".  In fact, the danger with a character like this can be the risk of making him less than three dimensional.  The writer has to be on the lookout that a figure like Dan Hilliard doesn't come off sounding or acting too Four-Square on paper.  If that happens, then you don't have a character on your hands.  It's just one of those card board cutout figures that wouldn't even pass muster in a child's Sunday sermon.  The good news is that Haynes and Wyler are smart enough to add just enough dimensions to Hilliard's character to make him a good foil to Griffin's thematic complexity.  He's the guy who got all the lucky breaks, and it's something that Griffin slowly brings him to an awareness of.  For whatever reason, he's been allowed to enjoy the good life.  So here comes one of the others who weren't so lucky in order to remind him of how much of an exception his world is.

It's an interesting role for Fredric March to play.  Just 9 years earlier, he had starred in a film called The Best Years of Our Lives.  That turned out to be one of the first films devoted to an examination of the hardships that a lot of veterans faced when coming home from the war.  It's one of those films that isn't afraid to take an unflinching look at the costs of battle.  Yet at the same time, it ends on this upbeat, positive note.  The Desperate Hours, meanwhile, takes those same Frank Capra qualities and almost manages to invert them on an interrogative level.  Here we see March playing what amounts to a variation of his same character from Best Years, and then learning what happens when he gets tossed onto the Noir side of the street.  I find it interesting that it was a subset of the Gothic genre (a field which was and still is often derided as a form of cheap Pulp entertainment) to be the one to try and tackle something like a serious examination of the opposite side of the same coin that featured in March's earlier film.  True to its title, Best Years features a protagonist who is able to reap the best possible benefits from his experiences overseas.  Desperate Hours treats us to a look at a life that was never able to get that kind of lucky break.  Instead, it's very much a story of wasted potential.

It's easy to imagine Bogart's character sharing the same sentiment expressed by Brando in On the Waterfront.  "You don't understand.  I could've had class.  I could've been a contender.  I could've been somebody (web)".  In other words, the question is why was Glenn Griffin denied the chance at a normal life?  Was it all his fault, the fate of the stars, or some other flaw in the system?  That's a question the film chooses to leave unanswered.  What can be said for sure is that there is a sense in which this movie counts as a Shakespearean Tragedy.  Even if this is so, the interesting part is how the film can never manage to throw in the towel.  It seems willing to hold out hope for the possibility of a better future.  This can be seen in the way the film treats it's younger characters.  Specifically, there's the Hilliard's older daughter, Cindy, and the aforementioned younger Griffin, Hal.  I've already glanced a bit at the idea of Dewey Martin's character as a representative of the incoming younger generation.  Now it's time to add the Hilliard's oldest daughter into the mix.  While she's yet another character who could be turned into a one-dimensional damsel in distress in the hands of a less skilled writer, here she is allowed to be an actual personality whose agency is what helps determine the course the story's conclusion.  On the level of the plot, pure and simple, she manages to convey her plight to the outside world just in time.

It's through a careful series of hints and clues that she leaves behind which allows both the police and her fiancée to take action against the convicts.  On a deeper thematic level, the fact that she is allowed a determining amount of agency within the narrative is another indication that the makers of this adaptation are aware of the growing power of the younger generation.  Haynes and Wyler appear to be smart enough to recognize the role that women have and still play in the wider scheme of things beyond the confines of the film.  Much like Hal Griffin, it's implied that there is a greater chance of a future for Cindy than there turned out to be even for the World War II era adults in her life.  It would be therefore be interesting to see a version of this story that drove the point home by having the figure of Hal be the one villain not to get away, so much as find a shot a having his own at a second chance for a better future.  It would be interesting to see how such a creative choice would reflect off of a character like Cindy Hilliard.  What it amounts to in the picture that we've got is still interesting in its own right.  The viewer is given an example of the Noir film demonstrating an awareness that it might just be possible for a younger and less burdened generation to help break the cycle of Gothic violence that has categorized and defined the subgenre since its inception.  It's a fascinating sight to watch unfold.

It makes The Desperate Hours into the kind of film with both feet planted in two surprisingly complimentary vantage points at once.  This is a movie that is willing to look forward as well as back.  It is aware of its generic tropes as a product of Noir, and yet it also casts its glance in an opposite and inverted direction.  It has to be one of the few films of the format that is willing to acknowledge the possibility of light at the end of the tunnel.  Perhaps this doubled sighted nature of the film as a story that looks both back to the past and forward to the future is fitting when you stop to consider its place in the history of the genre.  I can't tell whether Hollywood even makes crime thrillers like they did way long ago.  For the most, it seems as if Film Noir has sort of melted back into all the original formats from which it first emerged.  It means if you see any film that contains all of the elements of the 1930s and 40s era Crime Drama, then it only exists as just one element in a larger tapestry.  For the most part, this mean you can only catch what remains of the subgenre as just a single element in a story that's better classified as an Action Thriller, or else it functions in the service of a Gothic Horror film.  The last film I've seen that could ever come close to qualifying as the type of film that Wyler and Jaynes have made would have to be Martin Scorsese's The Irishman, which is a swan song in and of it's own right.

It really does seem as if The Desperate Hours has a legitimate claim to being the last Film Noir.  Perhaps there's even something fitting that it features the one actor who is most associated with the genre, and who first helped put it on the map in a major, defining way.  Film critics like to point to the Mickey Spillane adaptation of Kiss Me Deadly, which was released the same year as the last true film noir.  However, the overlooked existence of Hours proves that's not quite the case.  It may have been the last major motion picture to feature a detective as its protagonist, and that's about it.  It may have had one of the most memorable McGuffins in the history of cinema (one that would inspire both Spielberg and Tarantino by turns), yet it was never the last true Film Noir.  That honor goes to Bogie, Jaynes, and Wyler.  There's a great deal to be said for the idea that in many ways, Humphrey Bogart is the face and identity of Film Noir.  If there's any truth to the idea that he helped launch the subgenre into the kind of mainstream popularity that it still enjoys today, then the sense of him being allowed to take things full circle and be there at the close of Noir's heyday is perhaps the best tribute anyone could give him. 

It's also what makes watching this film something of a bittersweet experience.  This was to be Bogart's penultimate film.  He had one more picture in him after this, yet once that was over and done with, so was he.  All the years of being chronic smoker caught up with him in 1957, just two years after this movie.  For that very reason, considering that the Jaynes adaptation was his last major effort in the type of film that made him famous, I'll always have to consider the story of Glenn Griffin as Bogie's true final bow to the audience.  For what it's worth, I had a grand time with it.  This is one of those films that's unafraid to grab you by the throat and not let go.  Jayne's and Wyler prove themselves to be masters of what is now probably a very rare art in modern cinema.  They prove themselves to be experts at the kind of slow burn tension where the suspense that keeps you on the edge of your seat comes from knowing that one false step could lead to an outbreak of fatal violence, and so the entire narrative becomes a chess game to see who will make the first slip up that makes everything go to hell.  We the audience know it's inevitable, everything about the set up cues us to expect it to happen sooner or later.  So the viewer is left wondering when the big explosion is going to happen, and how is it going to effect the outcome.  I'll give away no spoilers here.  Instead, let's say Hitchcock could have made this film.

Let that stand as an idea of its overall quality.  As a finished product, The Desperate Hours stands as an overlooked gem of a film.  It's the forgotten curtain call for the grand Noir tradition in both Letters and Cinema.  It's the kind of film that deserved a greater deal of popular accolades and acclaim than it ever managed to get on its first release.  Instead, it's now the job of reviews like this to see if it can't help revive this picture's reputation in the eyes both of genre connoisseurs, as well as the mass audience at large.  This is a film that's well worth checking out.  What I recall most vividly about the ending was knowing that this was the last time Bogie would ever be in his prime element.  This is a knowledge I went into this film with, and the awareness of that fact colored my reaction to the denouement.  I remember thinking (and still do) that it's shame he never gave himself enough time to do perhaps just one or two more films to help cement his already considerable legacy.  If there was, I'd have urged Bogart to maybe try his hand at playing Philip Marlowe again in one last Raymond Chandler adaptation.  Something that would create a mirror bookend to his performance in The Maltese Falcon.  As it stands, though, The Desperate Hours is a fitting tribute to the artistry of Humphrey Bogart.