A Cry in the Night (1956 film)

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A Cry in the Night
Cry in the night 1956 poster small.jpg
Theatrical release poster
Directed by Frank Tuttle
Screenplay byDavid Dortort
Based onAll Through the Night
1955 novel
by Whit Masterson
Produced byGeorge C. Bertholon
Alan Ladd
Starring
Narrated byAlan Ladd
Cinematography John F. Seitz
Edited by Folmar Blangsted
Music by David Buttolph
Production
company
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Release dates
  • August 31, 1956 (1956-08-31)(New York)
  • [1]  ( [1] )
  • October 10, 1956 (1956-10-10)(Los Angeles)
Running time
75 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

A Cry in the Night is a 1956 American thriller film noir starring Edmond O'Brien, [2] Brian Donlevy, [3] Natalie Wood [4] and Raymond Burr. [5] Based on the 1955 Whit Masterson novel All Through the Night, [6] it was produced and narrated by Alan Ladd [7] [8] [9] and directed by Frank Tuttle.

Contents

A Cry in the Night was made for Ladd's production company Jaguar, although Ladd does not appear in the film. [10]

Plot

Eighteen-year-old Elizabeth “Liz” Taggart and her boyfriend Owen Clark visit a lovers' lane where childlike voyeur Harold Loftus secretly watches them. Loftus then knocks Owen unconscious and overpowers Liz, taking her to a shack.

A couple on a motorcycle try to revive Owen with liquor, but they leave when he does not awaken. Police arrive and mistakenly conclude that Owen is drunk. At the station, night-shift captain Ed Bates hears the story and realizes that Liz is the daughter of the day-shift captain Dan Taggart.

While holding Liz prisoner, Loftus kisses her. Loftus' mother Mabel phones police when her son does not return home. Liz seizes Loftus' gun but discovers that it is unloaded.

Taggart is furious with Owen, blaming him for what has happened, but Taggart's wife scolds her husband for intimidating their daughter to the point that she kept her romantic relationship secret. When the police officers find the shack, Owen ventures in alone, and when he finds Liz’s shoe lying on the ground, he realizes that she had been taken there. Harried by the police, Loftus shoots an officer and forces Liz up a stairwell and over catwalks. Owen sees that Loftus is about to ambush Taggart and saves Taggart's life by leaping on Loftus at the last second. Taggart begins beating Loftus, who cries out for his mother.

After Loftus is taken into custody, Taggart invites Owen to accompany Liz back home.

Cast

Production

Casting

Director Frank Tuttle had worked with Ladd on a number of occasions, most recently on Hell on Frisco Bay , a film starring Edward G. Robinson, who was initially discussed for the lead in A Covenant with Death. [11] The cast includes Edmond O'Brien and Richard Anderson, who was Ladd's son-in-law and was borrowed from MGM. [12] Brian Donlevy left a play commitment to appear in the film. [13] [14]

Natalie Wood was under contract to Warner Bros. [15] Many decades later, it was speculated that Wood may have lobbied to play the role partly as a means of exorcising personal demons from her own real-life rape. Wood was rumored to have had a romantic relationship with Raymond Burr during filming. [16] In the 2016 book Natalie Wood: Reflections on a Legendary Life, Manoah Bowman stated that Wood had to "fight to be cast in A Cry in the Night after completing Rebel hoping to stretch her dramatic skills in a gritty psychological thriller" but that the film "proved to be a disappointment." [4]

Screenplay

The film is based on the novel All Through the Night by Whit Masterson (pen name for Robert Wade and H. Bill Miller), which had appeared in Cosmopolitan . Anthony Boucher of The New York Times described the novel as "an intensely compact book ... and an unusually rich one," [17] later writing that it was one of the best books of the year. [18] According to Turner Classic Movies , several changes were made from the novel:

The girl in the book was knocked out early on and treated like a piece of furniture from then on. Her boyfriend wanted to help rescue her, but was sidelined by her bullying father, an unsympathetic brute in pursuit of an equally monstrous villain. There just wasn't much there for any actor to grab a hold of. David Dortort took the book's outline and reconfigured its details to make the characters more compelling: the sex fiend was now a repressed mamma's boy. This 32-year-old virgin has no other way to spend time with a woman aside from abducting her to a secret lair. And the object of his rapacious attention would no longer be an unconscious object, but a girl equally frustrated by the smothering attention of an overprotective parent, and capable of recognizing some humanity in her attacker. The boyfriend would no longer be relegated to the margins of the story, but would join the father in the hunt, where the two would have plenty of dramatic tension and mutual disrespect crackling between them. [16]

Release

A Cry in the Night premiered on August 31, 1956 at the RKO Palace Theatre in New York. [19]

Reception

In a contemporary review for The New York Times , critic Richard W. Nason called A Cry in the Night a "rather tasteless and makeshift melodrama." [1]

Margery Adams of The Boston Globe wrote: "The film moves surprisingly slowly, considering the content of the plot ... Miss Wood appears unusually stupid in dealing with her captor—as a policeman's daughter it would seem that she should know a little more about using psychology on a mentally retarded misfit." [20]

Wanda Hale of the New York Daily News wrote: "It's good advice the film gives but the story doesn't match it in sincerity. Too made-up are the situations and the suspense is weak, the denouement a foregone conclusion. And I cannot say that the acting is inspired." [21]

Home video

The film was released on DVD on July 26, 2016 by Warner Home Video on the Warner Archive Collection. [22]

See also

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References

  1. 1 2 3 Nason, Richard W. (1956-09-01). "The Screen: Marilyn Monroe Arrives". The New York Times . p. 19.
  2. ↑ Starr 2008, p. 66.
  3. ↑ Sculthorpe 2016, p. 168.
  4. 1 2 Bowman, Manoah (2016). Natalie Wood: Reflections on a Legendary Life. Philadelphia: Running Press. ISBN   978-0762460519.
  5. ↑ Newcomb 2004, pp. 374–375.
  6. ↑ Masterson, Whit (1955). All Through the Night (1st ed.). New York City: Dodd, Mead and Company. ASIN   B001NEO81Y.
  7. ↑ Monush 2003, p. 402.
  8. ↑ Winter et al. 2007, p. 568.
  9. ↑ "A Cry in the Night". Turner Classic Movies . Retrieved May 12, 2017.
  10. ↑ Thomas M. Pryor (Oct 13, 1955). "TV Story Bought For Metro Movie: Gelman Dramatization From Montgomery Show Is Titled 'Return of Johnny Burro'". The New York Times. p. 35.
  11. ↑ "MOVIELAND EVENTS: Ladd Film Slate Heavily Loaded" . Los Angeles Times . September 17, 1955. p. a6.
  12. ↑ Parsons, Louella (Oct 14, 1955). "Ladd Turns Producer for Change". The Washington Post and Times-Herald. p. 32.
  13. ↑ Schallert, Edwin (Oct 26, 1955). "Drama: Gail Russell to Star as Pioneer Nurse; Brian Donlevy Shifts to Film". Los Angeles Times. p. B7.
  14. ↑ Sculthorpe 2016, p. 192.
  15. ↑ LIZA WILSON, HOLLYWOOD EDITOR (Aug 19, 1956). "Hollywood's "teeniest" star". The Washington Post and Times-Herald. p. AW20.
  16. 1 2 Kalat, David. "A Cry in the Night". Turner Classic Movies . Retrieved July 14, 2012.
  17. ↑ Boucher, Anthony (1955-09-04). "Report on Criminals at Large". The New York Times Book Review . p. 12.
  18. ↑ Boucher, Anthony (1955-12-04). "Boucher's Best for 1955". The New York Times Book Review . p. 62.
  19. ↑ Crowther, Bosley (September 1, 1956). "The Screen: Marilyn Monroe Arrives; Glitters as Floozie in 'Bus Stop' at Roxy Stork Over Britain Tasteless Melodrama". The New York Times . Retrieved May 12, 2017.
  20. ↑ Adams, Margery (1956-09-20). "Screen Arrivals: Miss Wood Kidnaped in 2 Theatres". The Boston Globe . p. 16.
  21. ↑ Hale, Wanda (1956-09-02). "Crime Story Opens on Palace's Screen". New York Daily News . p. 8 (Section 2).
  22. ↑ A Cry in the Night (DVD). Burbank, California: Warner Home Video. July 26, 2016. ASIN   B01I0U57M2 . Retrieved May 12, 2017.

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