WILLIAM WYLER #3: LIKE SAND THROUGH AN HOUR GLASS... SO ARE OUR DESPERATE HOURS

WILLIAM WYLER: PART 2 OF 4: THE DESPERATE HOURS

Paired with last week’s Detective Story, TGTPTU’s Big Willie Winter continues with THE DESPERATE HOURS (1955), another black-and-white film adaptation by William Wyler and a rare feature from the director to not earn a single Academy Award nomination. 

Perhaps first home invasion picture, The Desperate Hours was adapted from a book that itself was inspired by tragic, real events (bonus fact: Richard Nixon would become involved in a lawsuit defending Time Magazine against the real-life victims who hadn’t agreed to a photo shoot in questionable taste at their former family home). Playing the lead heavy, Humphrey Bogart who with his character’s younger brother (played by Dewey Martin who, fun fact, was first married to a woman from Portland, Oregon and subsequently singer Peggy Lee) and a lug with more muscle than smarts on the lam take over a suburban home (bonus fact: the fictional house where the story takes place would later be used for the television show Leave It to Beaver) and soon butt heads with head-of-the household Daniel Hilliard, played by Fredric March, after seeing a bicycle left outside, a key indicator of a family with kids or, as those on the run know, prime hostage material. Wyler shows his mastery as a director getting an amazing performance from a child actor playing March’s son and providing depth and gravitas to all the characters. 

Oddly cast from the script and the book, Bogart at age 56 was significantly older than the original story would have his Glenn Griffin (Paul Newman, who would play the role on stage before the film was released, was only 30 years old). But the performance is nuanced, perhaps measured by Bogart’s at the time being diagnosed with the cancer that would soon kill him. 

During the course of The Desperate Hours (bonus snark: perhaps more accurately entitled The Desperate Afternoon Leading into that Night and on into Late the Next Day), Wyler ties in his recurring themes of pacifism, masculinity as performance, and the dangers of the police state in this film that, while feeling set-bound, it should be recalled that the play was written and performed after. All the same, a truck flips, a person is run over, and March has to pretend he’s drunk to disgust a visiting schoolteacher and save his family. Good stuff. 

 So give up sixtyish minutes for respite, ours will discuss it: flowers for Wyler, service ages for WWII vets, the elusive reality that started the Boomer Generation, and perhaps try a Bogart impersonation or two.  

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

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