"Fourteen Hours" is a real boost to the spirit if a bit of downer along the way. It's the rare film that needs wait till its final 15-20 minutes to deliver its greatest impact, or to find the implicit power promised in its first few scenes, but "Fourteen Hours" has many turning points, some moving upward, others downward, but no one can question its conclusion.
No doubt that Frank Faylen (room service waiter), Paul Douglas (traffic officer Dunnigan) and Richard Basehart (Robert Cosick), put this production into orbit. One is so compelled to watch them--but only until the police arrive. However, it's not the police chief (Howard Da Silva) nor all the bustling cops and actions that cause first negative turn, but rather it's the sheepishly resigned response by Officer Dunnigan to being ordered back to his street beat. Suddenly his passionate involvement with saving Robert seems to have been blown out the open window. And the viewer is jolted into lower expectations, which will not be singular, because Dunnigan will alternately be subjected to several more plot-demanded character adjustments that deprive him of his original and genuine persona.
The three vignettes taken from the crowd also, I think, detract from the film's effectiveness. The Grace Kelly and Debra Paget characters add little and seem relatively flat and pat in comparison to what's going on up on 16th floor. And the taxi drivers' main function seem to be to express the cynical side of the growing crowd. Thankfully, in their final scene together, they are shown, simply and convincingly, to abandon their cynicism.
The two "head doctors" are mainly a plus to the movie, but get a little lost in the long up and down middling part of the film. Martin Gable (Dr. Strauss) is particularly effective at least until his two-minute Freudian analysis of the mother. Which brings us to the parent scenes, none of which are that intelligible, and which rely far more on the appearance of psychological conflict, substance, and drama than on the real thing. They are just too difficult to disentangle and too boiler plate in conception. And it doesn't help that Dunnigan, like Dr. Strauss, quickly assumes the mother's guilt in the whole suicide scenario.
But the rhythm of "Fourteen Hours" changes and deepens dramatically once Barbara Bel Geddes (Virginia Foster) is escorted by police and emergency personnel into the hotel. Suddenly the film is back in touch with its opening scenes. Virginia, Robert, and Dunnigan will now engage in real speech, real communication, and real caring. The Freudian stuff will give way to the existential influence expressed as anomie and alienation in Robert's poem which Virginia's accurately recalls and conveys. And Dunnigan will bring Robert down from his lofty philosophical despair by expressing the down-to-earth, resigned beauty of his traffic cop's life, which is so much less overwrought, inactive, individualistic, and isolated (family, work) than Robert's. So, Virginia and Dunnigan fill that dizzying gap beneath Robert's feet with reciprocity, human-ness, and transformation.
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