Make Haste to Live (1954)

That was an excellent one.

Really Surprised!

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

The plot for "Make Haste to Live" had promise...but ultimately the film made little sense and this annoyed me. It really could have been a good film.Crystal Benson was married to a violent mobster, Steve (Stephen McNally). He slapped the snot out of her and she was naturally afraid of him. Ultimately, she escaped and the law thought that he'd killed her and disposed of the body. So, even without a corpse, he was convicted and spent 18 years in prison. Now, he's out...and looking to exact his revenge on her...now that he's found her.While this sounds like a great plot, somehow the writing was not up to snuff. When Steve shows up in the small New Mexico town where she lives, she doesn't tell anyone who his is nor that he's threatening to kill her. Instead, inexplicably, he passes him off as her brother...and allows him to hang around her and her daughter....a young lady who doesn't know that her 'uncle' is actually her horrible father. Why doesn't Crystal tell EVERYONE he's out to kill her, he's a mobster AND why she ran?! This just doesn't make sense and the film became tedious...tedious because the solution to the problem seems simple yet the heroine seems inexplicably dim.

I'm a huge Dorothy McGuire fan and had was initially excited at discovering a film noir that I hadn't yet seen. About twenty minutes in I realized why I've never heard of this one. It's actually painful to watch. I really don't like any of the characters and have given up at 59 minutes. Just don't care what happens. For me, this is a first.

How can you not love Dorothy McGuire? That haunting face who played so many scared little waifs, troubled but sweet romantic heroines and long-suffering wives and mothers has a hallmark on what screen ladies should be like. She was pretty, not a glamour girl, had eyes that would draw you into wanting to protect her, and would make you feel as if you've known her all her life. But even a star like her has to have at least one fiasco, and this Republic thriller is it. As the mother of an 18 year old girl, she covers the ground of my last description of her archetypes, but in playing a troubled lady in distress, goes back to the scared little waif, here not a young girl anymore but one so troubled by her past that she instantly gains your concern for her. It's just a shame that she's surrounded by one of the worst screenplays I've ever seen filmed and has to deal with the most unbelievable plot devices outside a 1940's serial.It's made apparent in the first scene that something or someone is stalking her, and at this point it's O.K. It's "The Spiral Staircase" all over again. But when she goes to local sheriff Edgar Buchannan and asks for a gun and gives no reason (and he simply gives one to her without question!), the eye roll begins and doesn't stop until the film is at its end. It turns out that McGuire, now a local newspaper editor, is being stalked by her snarling estranged husband (Stephen McNally), and flashbacks detail of how they courted, married, fought over his life of crime, and how she escaped from that by escorting a girlfriend (Carolyn Jones) on a trip, only to be thought of as dead when a girl he brought home somehow blew up. Now she's a respected member of this sagebrush community with a pretty 18 year old daughter (Mary Murphy) who tells her about a stranger she met who indeed turns out to be McNally, freed after 18 years in prison allegedly for killing her!When a suspense film as stupid as this stops being suspenseful because you are either laughing or shaking your head constantly at it, you know you've come across a real dog. McGuire gives her best shot to the ridiculous plot, but at times, you really want to shake her character and tell her to "shoot the bastard!". Somehow, her gun (hidden in an unlocked bedroom bureau) turns into a snake, ends up in the hands of a local youth accused of murder, and McGuire leads McNally on a chase to an old Indian burial ground where she intends to kill him so her daughter won't find out what kind of psychopath fathered her. I can appreciate the lavish imagination utilized to create such a plot, but it's one ridiculous twist right after another, and with nobody figuring out the connection between McGuire and McNally, is filled with the stupidest characters outside of a cartoon. In fact, with its desert mid western setting among mountains and caverns and canyons, it begins to take on the feeling of a Road Runner/Coyote short. McGuire even turns over an envelope of money to her daughter's boyfriend "just in case something happens to her". I've seen some bad films in my time, but unless you are a writer and don't want this to happen to you, this is one to "Make Haste to Avoid".

The spooky opening sequence piques our appetite for Make Haste to Live. A sinister stranger looms in the bedroom where Dorothy McGuire tosses in restive sleep. The editor of a small-town newspaper in the New Mexico desert, she's being stalked by her husband, a gangster just released from the pen for murder -- HER murder. Seems that years before, in Chicago, a woman was killed in an rigged explosion; when the body was identified as hers, McGuire packed up and started a new life.But having set up this intriguing situation, Make Haste to Live loses its way and ends up a muddled mess. When the husband (Steven McNally) insinuates himself into the household of McGuire and their teenage daughter, he's passed off as a black-sheep brother. And credulity gets strained way past the snapping point. McGuire flip-flops between resourceful adversary and the most feckless of battered wives; at times the two roil with hatred for one another but at others a light flirtatiousness enters their interactions. Any valid psychology in this, however, isn't worked out in dramatic terms; we get no sense of the hold McNally has over his wife, only that he wants to kill her and she seems willing to die.A Bottomless Pit in an old Indian pueblo makes an early appearance but doesn't end up playing the role we come to expect it will; so the final resolution is contrived, coming not out of character but out of the blue. Moseying along from one thing to another, Make Haste to Live has no urgent destination in mind.