THE STEEL TRAP (1952: Dir. Andrew Stone)
A BLUEPRINT FOR MURDER (1953: Dir. Andrew Stone)
In the 1950s, there was only one filmmaker apart from Alfred Hitchcock, who consistently delivered superior white knuckle entertainment to cinema-goers, Andrew L. Stone. Beginning in 1950 with the gut-punching gangster film Highway 301, this maverick writer-director-producer made nearly one suspense film a year until Ring of Fire in 1961 ended his unprecedented string of low budget successes. Stone, often with his wife and editor Virginia as co-producer, had been directing films for nearly twenty years when he finally hit his stride with a pair of lean nail-biters starring Joseph Cotten. Both of these were mini-masterpieces of domestic tension, and featured Cotten as a man struggling to care for his family under the most desperate circumstances. In The Steel Trap, he is the grasping husband of naive homemaker Theresa Wright, who successfully steals from the bank where he works only to have second thoughts. The film's coup de cinema comes when he decides to return the money before its discovered, leading to an extended sequence of almost unbearably nerve-wracking intensity as he attempts to rectify his misdeeds with the same precise planning that he used to execute the robbery. Stone, whose independently financed films where a textbook model of economy, always believed in the use of real locations instead of studio built sets, not just for parsimonious reasons, but to add a contemporary reality often missing from glossy Hollywood products. This practice was particularly effective in The Steel Trap, a film that lingers in the methodical detail and procedure of the bank and its employees, as it slowly tightens an invisible vice grip around the audiences' throat during the film's ticking clock climax. Director and star reunited the following year in A Blueprint For Murder, another solid suspenser with Cotten as a distraught man trying to solve the murder of his wealthy young niece. Unspooling in a brisk 76 minutes, ten minutes shorter than their previous collaboration, Blueprint, is, despite its mundane police procedural elements, nearly as heart-stopping, with a wrap-up that keeps one guessing almost until the end credits roll. In both films Cotten acquits himself admirably in roles which require him to convincingly convey moral uncertainty, while at the same time displaying a genuine and sympathetic every-man earnestness. As box-office insurance Stone made sure to cast previous Cotten co-stars as his love interests. Theresa Wright, who had played his admiring niece in Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt (1947) becomes his loving spouse in The Steel Trap, and Jean Peters, the well-intentioned woman who discovered Cotton's uxoricidal intentions toward an unfaithful Marilyn Monroe in Niagara (1953), this time plays his coolly elegant and recently widowed sister-in-law. Stone was able to repeat this winning combination with two memorable back-to-back James Mason vehicles, Cry Terror! (1958), a paranoid home invasion extortion thriller, and The Decks Ran Red (1958), an offbeat seafaring tale of murder and salvage. Prior to that he also gave Doris Day her most emotionally overwrought role as the eponymous wife terrorized by pathologically jealous husband Louis Jordan in Julie (1956), an exercise in near hysterical unease. My particular favourite of Stone's suspense cycle is The Last Voyage (1960), a sinking cruise ship disaster movie with stalwart hero Robert Stack bravely rescuing his family from breathtaking jeopardy, his wife poignantly portrayed by Stack's former Written On The Wind (1957) co-star Dorothy Malone. Typical of the director's constant efforts at cinema verisimilitude, Stone rented the Ile de France ocean liner and flooded parts of it under controlled conditions, even insisting his actors undergo death-defying peril including Stack, who, with only a wire around his wrist, valiantly traversed a narrow plank precariously perched over an actual 73 foot drop. Ring of Fire, with Deputy Sheriff David Jansen menaced by a raging forest fire while being held hostage by a gang of criminal fugitives, provided a fitting end to this pot-boiling phase of Stone's oeuvre. Turning the page, Stone decamped to London where he made three largely forgotten comedies, followed by Song Of Norway (1970) and The Great Waltz (1972), a misguided matched set of thoroughly maudlin musicals whose disastrous receptions spelled the end of his career behind the camera. Having the last laugh, he lived to the grand old age of 96, long enough for critics to finally acknowledge this early auteur of anxiety.
