Make Haste to Live

Make Haste to Live showed me once again what an inexhaustible source of good movies Classic Hollywood was. I've seen many but there's always another one and the treasure chest seems to have no bottom. This is a small film, in black and white but with a wider format than the traditional one. It was produced and directed for Republic Pictures by William Seiter based on a script by Warren Duff. It is a noir story, set in a small town in the State of New Mexico where life is peaceful and predictable. There, in the local newspaper works as an editor Crystal Benson (Dorothy McGuire) a supposed widow with her daughter Randy (Mary Murphy) of 18 years who is about to graduate from high school. But at night, she has nightmares, because the past is about to take its revenge. In reality Randy's father was a gang member named Steve (Steven McNally) who has just left prison after a long sentence for the supposed murder of his wife Zena. In reality, Zena has changed her name and is now Crystal, and when she ran away from her husband, she was pregnant and not thinking clearly. Her friend Rose (Carolyn Jones, the famous Morticia of the Addams Family) tried to explain Zena's situation but was not convincing and, faced with the doubt and the unidentified corpse that implicated Steve, the latter ended up being sentenced to 20 years in prison.

In the town, the sheriff is Edgar Buchanan, an actor who played countless supporting roles in westerns and other genres. And we also meet Crystal's long-suffering suitor, Josh, played by another efficient B-movie actor, John Howard, a former pilot during the Second World War and now a scholar of the labyrinthine dwellings built by the Indians who inhabited the region, the Pueblo tribe.

Things will get heated in this interesting thriller in which I will not fail to praise the exceptional performance of the two main characters, Dorothy McGuire and Stephen McNally. Every time they are together, and luckily it is a big part of the film, the level of tension and drama rises. She appears calm but is actually desperate and he is perversely threatening like a volcano about to erupt. It is worth seeing them act.

Dorothy McGuire gives a strong performance in "Make Haste to Live" from 1954.

McGuire plays Crystal Benson, who runs the newspaper in a small Colorado town. She has a beau, Josh (John Howard) and a daughter Randy (Mary Murphy). When Randy reports that she met a man who said she reminded him of her mother, Crystal panics. She gets a gun from the sherriff's office, hands Randy's boyfriend $1000 to keep safe for her, and makes a recording explaining the situation to her daughter.

It turns out Crystal was married to a vicious criminal, Steve (Stephen McNally) who was accused of killing someone. Crystal, with the help of a good friend, Mary (a blond Carolyn Jones) escapes from him. Later on she finds out that Steve brought a woman home, and the house blew up. Police believed it was Crystal, and while cleared of the first murder, he went to prison for one he didn't commit.

Nineteen years have passed, and Steve has shown up, realizing Randy is his daughter. He befriends Randy, and Crystal passes him off as her brother. Meanwhile, she's desperate to escape again.

Someone posted on IMDb that panning a Dorothy McGuire movie is like applauding the person who killed Bambi's mother, but I must say, this is lousy. First of all, Steve meets Randy and she reminds him of her mother? In what universe?

Also you just want to throttle the McGuire character. Why not just tell everyone he's no good and have the sherriff and her boyfriend pressure him to get out of town? Or tell Randy the truth - so her father is a psychopath, that doesn't make her one.

Not only that, we're shown something in the beginning that we assume (wrongly) will play into the final denoument. It doesn't. That makes the whole thing contrived.

I saw Dorothy McGuire on stage in Night of the Iguana. A wonderful actress. Skip this.

The spooky opening sequence piques our appetite for Make Haste to Live. A sinister stranger looms in the bedroom where Dorothy McGuire tosses in restive sleep. The editor of a small-town newspaper in the New Mexico desert, she's being stalked by her husband, a gangster just released from the pen for murder -- HER murder. Seems that years before, in Chicago, a woman was killed in an rigged explosion; when the body was identified as hers, McGuire packed up and started a new life.

But having set up this intriguing situation, Make Haste to Live loses its way and ends up a muddled mess. When the husband (Steven McNally) insinuates himself into the household of McGuire and their teenage daughter, he's passed off as a black-sheep brother. And credulity gets strained way past the snapping point. McGuire flip-flops between resourceful adversary and the most feckless of battered wives; at times the two roil with hatred for one another but at others a light flirtatiousness enters their interactions. Any valid psychology in this, however, isn't worked out in dramatic terms; we get no sense of the hold McNally has over his wife, only that he wants to kill her and she seems willing to die.

A Bottomless Pit in an old Indian pueblo makes an early appearance but doesn't end up playing the role we come to expect it will; so the final resolution is contrived, coming not out of character but out of the blue. Moseying along from one thing to another, Make Haste to Live has no urgent destination in mind.

I didn't really understand what the ex-con ex-husband "had" on the main character and what he was trying to do to her and her daughter. I did like the small Western town setting with the Indian Ruins excavation site and the idea of her attempting to escape via the chartered plane, the suspense and down-to-the-wire excitement. And the villain was a menacing character.

When her gangster husband is paroled, a woman fears for herself and her teenage daughter. Sounds like a good "out of the past" premise, but turns out to be a tepid thriller. There are brief hints of danger but they fizzle out, with Stephen McNally being a rather non-threatening presence and Dorothy McGuire uneven in her characterization. One minute she's haunted by nightmares, the next she seems quite comfortable with the situation. This thing just has no guts to it. What kind of movie teases the audience with a bottomless pit and then denies them the payoff? I've heard of Chekhov's Gun, but Chekhov's Hole? A nice score by Elmer Bernstein is wasted on this humdrum do-nothing picture.