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By shooting most of the picture in Manhattan, where he restaged the Warde incident on the window ledge of a downtown building, Director Henry (The House on 92nd Street) Hathaway has packed it with authentic visual detail, taken full advantage of the variety of camera angles afforded by surrounding skyscrapers and streets. He pictures the long death watch in all its morbid excitement: the small figure hugging the wall, the police mobilization, the maneuvering of relatives and psychiatrists behind the scenes, the milling, craning mobs below.
An ingenious script by John Paxton enriches the story with meaning while leading it to a believable climax that is more dramatic than the real-life ending. The movie is just as concerned with why the would-be jumper (Richard Basehart) poises on the ledge as with whether an Irish cop (Paul Douglas) will succeed in talking him back into the hotel room. The script weaves both questions into a taut continuity unbroken by the easy device of flashbacks. The tangled causes of Base-hart's plight emerge dramatically within the action, and the script's psychiatric explanations—the curse of many a movie —prove convincingly easy to take.
The picture lightens its life-or-death tension with flashes of humor in its treatment of cops and crowds. It is somewhat less successful in two of three subplots designed to sketch varying reactions to the spectacle. One of these, showing how a woman is moved to call off her divorce, is too ambitious; another, a sidewalk romance struck up by a couple of strangers, is overdone. The third is topnotch: a group of cabbies get up a betting pool on when Basehart will jump, feel a growing sense of shame as the hours tick by.
Actors Douglas and Basehart keep right up with the fast company of excellent supporting players: Robert Keith as the young man's sheepish father; Howard da Silva as a harried deputy police commissioner; Agnes Moorehead, superb in the role of the mother who needs a psychiatrist as badly as her suicidal son.
U.S.S. Teakettle (20th Century-Fox) tackles a bright comic idea: the plight of 90-day wonders in the U.S. Navy who are baffled by a stubborn little experimental sub chaser, the PC1168.
The "ship," scornfully dubbed the U.S.S. Teakettle, carries a steam engine instead of the usual diesel, plus a big, fractious apparatus to turn sea water into fresh water for the boiler. Reserve Lieut. Gary Cooper, the reluctant choice of a war-harassed Navy, reports for duty at the ship's Norfolk mooring, gulps when he learns that he is in command. For the job of testing the new contraption, he has three equally green officers (Eddie Albert, Jack Webb, Richard Erdman), and a hardbitten, old-Navy boatswain's mate (Millard Mitchell), who is ashamed to be seen with any of them.
Steering a miserable course between harangues by the Navy brass and taunts by other crews, Cooper & Co. struggle with such problems as making the perverse little monster stop & go, and trying to remember at a bad moment how to code an SOS. Before the Navy has had enough, the Teakettle plows into an aircraft carrier, floats helplessly into submarine lanes, runs amuck in a ship-crowded, bridge-cluttered channel.