Bogart’s 1950s filmography reads like an X-ray of Golden Age Hollywood’s bipolar soul. That uneasy marriage of art and commerce delivered wildly varying results. Nobody could predict what would plop out next time they cranked the handle of the ailing Studio System: could be a classic, might be a turkey. For every In a Lonely Place, there was always another Left Hand of God.
Bogart spent years battling studio boss Jack Warner over the quality of roles on offer. He’d sulk on his yacht with Sinatra or David Niven (not Bacall, who disliked the ocean because it lacked a branch of Tiffany’s) and fire off vituperative telegrams telling Warner where to stick it. By the ‘50s, he had his own production company, but he often got out-bid by the studios on the properties he wanted to develop.
The Desperate Hours was one of them. Spencer Tracy was set to co-star, but neither actor’s ego could accede to second billing, so the role went to Frederic March. A much more traditional Hollywood figure than Bogart, March slots into the role of stolid middle-aged banker Daniel C Hilliard like a cash drawer slamming back into a till.
Hilliard’s affluent nuclear family home is invaded by escaped convicts Glen and Hal Griffin (Bogart and Dewey Martin), assisted by the brutish Samuel Kobish (Robert Middleton). The titular hours of desperation are those endured by Hilliard and his family. Ostensibly. But an undercurrent builds that suggests it’s the escapees who’re really trapped: the increasingly “desperate” ones are Griffin, his younger brother Hal, and their stumbling, feral crony Kobish.
Received wisdom says Bogart always played Bogart. It’s reductive nonsense, of course, but with Glen Griffin he is, in part, pastiching earlier Bogie roles. Echoes of The Petrified Forest abound: he’s Duke Mantee twenty years on, with arthritis and a toupee.
But Bogart’s not playing for laughs. He spits out his words like they’re pellets of poison. The simmering in his eyes can be truly frightening. It’s a self-conscious performance, but it stops short of scenery-chewing. His grizzled face - covered in what would be better described as “vegetation” than stubble - projects a grim sense of world-weary pathos.
As the plot progresses, fissures appear in its various male characters’ conceptions of masculinity. This is most apparent in the volatile energy crackling between March and Bogart, the pair warily circling one another like bull and matador while their parallel but unequal predicaments ebb and flow. Griffin’s paternalistic but fraught relationship with his brother holds a mirror to Hilliard’s struggle to calm his young son, Ralphy (Richard Eyer). Ralphy wants his Dad to be a hero and stand up to these goons; Hilliard knows it’s smarter to run the clock down, rather than antagonize three violent criminals with little to lose.
Hal’s in thrall to his brother, but he takes a shine to Hilliard’s daughter Cindy (Mary Murphy, best known for sparring gamely with Brando in The Wild One). The Hilliards’ deluxe lifestyle is a revelation: “Two bathrooms! What a layout,” Kobish yells after careening around the house like a wild animal. Hal stands gazing at the silk pillows and lacy fringes on Cindy’s four-poster bed, and starts to think maybe there’s more to life than being a penniless fugitive holding an innocent family hostage while the police close in.
Bogart was alert to the themes of class, and inequality of opportunity, that are threaded through the story. Griffin isn’t some young hooligan, the next generation breaking bad: he’s around the same age as Hilliard, and fully aware of how early on the parameters of his own life were fixed.
In his early gangster roles, Bogart radiated cynicism and aggression; by the 50s he’d distilled the menace down to something darker. There’s a sharp tang of authentic nastiness to his demeanour. Fixed in a permanent rictus, his face shudders with the constant struggle to maintain self-control.
Dewey Martin was no cream puff, either. He flew fighter planes in WWII, and fought in the Battle of Midway. Sadly he’s often a little aloof here, which stunts the potential of the scenes between the brothers.
March delivers a surprisingly flinty performance as Hilliard, gradually revealing layers of his character he hadn’t previously acknowledged. Hilliard says he’s ready to kill Griffin; we wonder if that means he’ll kill him “if he has to”, or if he gets the chance. The film asks frankly: does violence lurk within all of us?
The 1950s was a convulsive decade for Hollywood. The studios cast around for gimmicks to lure audiences away from TV and back into theatres. The Desperate Hours was filmed in VistaVision, so a cynic might call it appropriately named. But it does create a unique dynamic between the wide format, deep focus, and stifling interiors: widescreen claustrophobia.
This wonderful transfer does full credit to Lee Garmes’s lush black and white cinematography, and director William Wyler’s meticulous blocking and framing. Daniel Kremer’s commentary is affable and wide-ranging. In her 15 minute video essay on Bogart, Eloise Roberts discusses the ineffable Bogie “aura”.
José Arroyo’s introduction, Trouble in Suburbia, adds much to our understanding of how Wyler uses form to enact content. There’s also thought-provoking discussion on how the film can be read as a veiled commentary on the underlying paranoia of the Eisenhower era. Overall, this is one of the best Bogart Blu-ray packages yet released.
As a movie star, Bogart’s legacy is secure. It’s often a stylized fame, though: all fedoras, filterless cigarettes, trenchcoats and “Here’s looking at you, kid”. The image is readily parodied. But he was also a great technical actor, a fact that gets lost in the fog of iconography.
Too many Bogie films are seldom seen today. And it needs to be said: he made some bad films, but no Bogart film was ever bad because of Bogart. The Desperate Hours is an important, thematically rich film, with genuine psychological depth. It was Bogart’s penultimate movie, and he puts in a performance it’d be criminal to miss.
