The Night Holds Terror

Moviecut—The Night Holds Terror

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The Night Holds Terror is about a family man, on the way home, who makes the dreadful mistake of picking up a hitchhiker. He then is forced to pick up the hitcher's cohorts. The three are quite a lot. The hitcher is a woman-crazy creep, the third guy is a semi decent jerk who involved himself with the wrong pair. The second is the worst of the three. A clever, amoral psychopath who loves to mentally torture his victims. Done in a semi documentary style, this film has some very tense moments. Very worth watching.

A 1955 crime noir which involves a trio of hitchhikers taking a family hostage. Based on a true story, we find the father, an engineer by trade whose father owns a chain of businesses, being picked up by a trio of thugs who take him back to his home to keep the family (mother & their 2 children) hostage till morning (he ends up selling his car to get them off his back & needs to wait for the cash) but when it's revealed who his father is, they opt for a large payday. The next morning the kidnappers take the father as a means for his wife to not call the police (through a fluke of circumstance she nearly gets caught because the kidnappers have a cop radio) but once the authorities realize the stakes involved, an intense manhunt commences (primarily trying to track their calls down using methods we would recognize as archaic) but keeps the suspense on an ever increasing vise grip. Future notables John Cassavetes & Vince Edwards play a couple of the kidnappers & Jack Kruschen (from The Apartment) played one of the detectives.

A gritty kidnapping caper (complete with no-nonsense, "Dragnet"-style narration) that turns into a documentary-style police procedural as the cops begin to close in. After a sensational beginning--featuring a carjacking, a home invasion, and a very terrified family--the movie begins to lose some steam in the second half (there are lots of shots of hard-working, real-life police dispatchers and telephone operators), but you'll still want to hang on till the end. With a very young John Cassavetes and a pre-"Ben Casey" Vince Edwards as two of the thugs. Based on actual events.

. . . many if not most members of which will go miles out of their way for a chance to fall prey to Stockholm Syndrome. A couple Swedish psychologists won the Nobel Prize for Medicine when they discovered that women go Ga-Ga for Bad Boys, the viler the better. As his wife Doris slow-dances with one of the three Swedish thugs threatening to kill their pair of urchins, husband Gene realizes that with a spouse like Doris a guy has a built-in enemy. Just as that ancient Greek playwright documented that many moms are eager to bake tyke pie for the right bad man, Doris seems to be more worried about coming up with the perfect crust than in displaying any true sign of maternal feelings throughout THE NIGHT HOLDS TERROR.

Evading a manhunt three escaped convicts takeover the home of Jack Kelly and Hildy Parks and their two small children. The three are John Cassavetes, Vince Edwards and David Cross are about as mean a trio you'll find on film. It's also apparent that Cross is playing way out of his league with the other two. It's an open hostage situation meaning that the trio really has no fixed plans what they are doing next which is worse for the hostages because they have no idea when or if they'll be free. Especially bad for Parks because Edwards is getting ideas about her. The husband and wife team of Andrew an Virginia Stone present this film in a fine and realistic documentary style. The film benefits from the fact that Kelly, Cassavetes, and Edwards were not any kind of names yet on the big or small screen. And Hildy Parks was primarily a New York actress The film compares well with The Desperate Hours which had a lot of big name players in it. While The Desperate Hours has a lot of style to it The Night Holds Terror far more realistic. This one is a real sleeper, catch it if possible.

A stentorian baritone tells us that what we are about to watch is based on a true story and I can believe it. Nobody would make up such a whimsical drama. There's an amateurish quality to this movie. It's like watching a television program, a very long episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" or the early series of "Dragnet". None of the performances is notable. All are hardly believable. The direction is functional and uninspired. The photography and lighting are high key, out of "I Love Lucy." The dialog is of no help. It all sounds written and unexciting except when it stumbles, as if by accident, into something original or so corny as to be impressive. "I'd just as lief stick a knife into you as not." An upper-class house is "swank." (I can almost hear the ghost of Little Caesar marveling, "Say, ain't this a swank dump you got here!") The first-person narrative of Kelly, the kidnap victim who picks up the wrong hitch hiker, takes over the narration and tells us all about his inner feelings, as opposed to his outer feelings, when he and his family are taken into custody by four kidnappers and robbers. At first, the four miscreants take him out into the desert to simply kill him and steal his wallet and car. (The actual makes are mentioned -- "Chrysler" and "Merc.") But, as with true psychopaths, their ambitions grow waggishly to include finally two hundred grand from Kelly's well-to-do father. Then the plot gets more complicated and begins to resemble real life in its unpredictability. The style also changes. Instead of a psychological drama involving a family held captive, the movie turns into one of those docudramas about the Los Angeles Police Force in its technical aspect, the sort that were made so popular in the post-war years by directors like Henry Hathaway -- "The House on 92nd Street" and the rest. I found the last third more interesting. In the movies, when the police try to trace a phone call, we never learn any of the details. A cop tells the victim to keep the call going as long as possible. They usually fail to trace the call to its source or, if they succeed, they find only an empty phone booth at the other end. Here, there is a good deal of mechanical and electronic stuff that was over my head, involving "bays" and "relays" and "routers." But at least we learn how complex a process a trace is. And I never knew that a simple procedure by a telephone operator could keep a connection traceable even after the caller had hung up. Now I'm beginning to worry about all those marketeers that call me at dinner time. I can do without the free dancing lessons at Arthur Murray's. But hardly anything can save the film from being routine. The actors walk through the fully lighted stage sets, hit their marks, make a face resembling an expression, recite their lines, and walk away -- except for Vince Edwards. He does all the other things but he doesn't make a face resembling an expression. His features remain placid and neutral, no matter the situation. He was perfect as Ben Casey.

Gritty little suspenser that holds interest throughout. Writer-director Andrew Stone's and wife Virginia's reputation rests on a documentary-style approach to film-making. Making a movie about people on board a sinking ship?-- then sink an actual ship, The Last Voyage (1958). I believe it was Andrew Sarris who observed that it was a good thing they never made a film about the end of the world! There's a lot of that documentary approach in this low-budgeter taken from an actual kidnapping case of the period. Kidnapping was much in the news in 1953 with the sensational abduction for ransom of little Bobby Greenlease, of Kansas City, I believe. And, of course, then as now, screen-writers love to chase the headlines of the day. So it's no surprise that several of these plot-lines turned up at about the same time, including the rather eerie Big House, USA (1955). Here the screenplay recreates the abduction of the offspring of a wealthy LA-area family, Gene Couture. What makes the movie work is the inspired casting (probably a happy accident) that brings together three fast-rising young actors-- a sullen Vince Edwards, a moody John Cassavetes, and an appealing Jack Kelly as the victim. You really get the feeling from the former two-- who look edgy and act even edgier-- that anything can happen at any time. Together as the lead abductors, they're little short of the proverbial dynamite. When they take Kelly into the desert, you get the feeling he's a dead duck for sure. Then too, the Stone's insistence on real suburban locations lends the proceedings a look and feel different from the usual. The procedural part gets kind of draggy as the cops enter the case and was likely inspired by the police mega-hit of the day, Dragnet. But at least it's consistent with the over-all documentary tone. Some buffs see the movie as noir. I don't, taking it instead as a particularly effective example of the "home invasion" genre that was also popular at the time. But however you cut it, this is still a darn good little 90 minute nail-biter.

(Some Spoilers) It's when electronic engineer Gene Courtire, Jack Kelly, casually gave hitchhiker Victor Gosset, Vince Edwards, a lift his world turned upside-down. With the not too alert Gosset mistaking Courtier's Mercury for a Lincoln Continental, in him thinking by driving an expensive car like that Courtier is loaded, everything started to go downhill for Gosset and his fellow hoods Robert Batsford, John Cassavetes, and Luther Logan, David Cross. Not only didn't Courtier have the big bucks that the trio of hoods were looking for but by kidnapping, a capital crime, him and later his wife Doris, Hildy Parks, they now face the San Quentin gas chamber if their caught: Which according to FBI statistics is in kidnappers getting caught is something like 99.9 % of the time. Instead of playing it safe and dropping the entire matter the thee hoodlums, two wanted by the police for murder, keep running with the ball, or kidnapping, making things even more worse for themselves then they already are. Both Gosset & Batsford who at first were more then willing to murder Courtire if he as much as looked at them later let the guy and his wife live even after in a number of incidents they were attacked and assaulted by the battling couple! And in one case almost killed by one, Gene Courtier, of them! All the retaliation that came for the murderous duo was Courtier just getting belted to the ground by an enraged, whom he earlier almost killed, Gosset when he wasn't looking. The film went on and on with the three stooges, Gosset Batsford & Logan, screwing up at every turn giving the police and FBI all the time they needed to finally capture them. It was Logan who came up with the "bright" idea to get Courtier's rich businessman dad, Stanley Andrews, to pay a $200,000.00 ransom to get his son back. By then Mrs Courtier was for some unexplained reason released by the kidnappers together with her two children making the kidnappers chances of getting away with their half baked crime even more difficult then it already was! ***SPOILERS*** Still thinking that he's got all the winning cards in the deck the head kidnapper Bastford, looking like he's Jerry Lewis' evil twin brother, demanded that the ransom money be delivered to him and his boys, Gosset & Logan, within the hour or Gene Courtier is history. The brainless jerk didn't realized that he was kept on the phone for something like 15 minutes so his whereabouts could be traced by the police. And sure enough just as both Bastford and Gosset, by then fellow kidnapper Logan was completely out of the picture, were waiting for the big payoff they were surrounded by 187 police and FBI units, a record in California crime history, before they could even realize just how ridicules their perfect plan or crime really was!