The Desperate Hours

Melodrama is a fairly disreputable form of art, and in most cases the sneers of the critics are well earned. The practitioners of this sort of drama usually worry only about stimulating the adrenalin glands of their audiences, while asking them to leave their minds at home. Joseph Hayes, who adapted his original novel both as a play and as the present movie, is different. He knew how to write a well-sustained thriller; but when the shock of that wears off, he leaves the viewer with the sense that the film says something true about the way man thinks and feels.

Hayes' story has a journalistic sort of clarity generally found on the screen only in the best documentaries. A trio of escaped convicts looking for a place to hide find the perfect setup in the middle-class home of a department store executive. In order to arouse no suspicions among the neighbors and the police, the criminals force the executive and his family to live as though nothing had happened. The Kafka-like mixture of horror and routine that results gives the picture most of its emotional impact.

The real distinction of The Despcrate Hours, though, comes out of the performance of Frederic March as the head of the beleaguered household. He is almost majestic in the role of a man left quite alone with nothing but his own courage and brain in a situation where society cannot help him. March has to fear the police as much as the criminals, because he knows that his family would be the first to die in a battle. And he cannot quite trust his family-a wife, a ten-age daughter, and a ten-year-old son-because they all demonstrate that they would lose their heads if he were not around. In the end, he emerges as close to a real hero as any figure in modern drama.

If March shows a man at his unadorned best, Humphrey Bogart just as skilfully gets inside the workings of a criminal mentality and depicts it as what it is: the mind of an animal. Yet he and the other two jungledwellers, Dewey Martin and Robert Middleton, have their sympathetic moments. They are animals, but curiously complex ones.

The Desperate Hours, as a matter of fact, is quite complex throughout. William Wyler's direction has decorated the plot with small incidents and byplay which illuminate the characters but do not slow down the speed with which the picture races to its climax. Nor does Wyler ever stop to interject some sort of vague message or a commentary on such topics as police corruption. There is a statement about that, but it has its function in the story. And although the film does not strain for a message, it still has a point: a man's greatest dignity comes from his devotion to his family. THOMAS K. SCHWABACHER