MAKSQUIBS CINEMATHEQUE: HELL'S FIVE HOURS (1958)

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Saturday, October 3, 2020

HELL'S FIVE HOURS (1958)

Short, but tiresome. Jack L. Copeland’s solo shot at film (he wrote, directed, produced) is shopworn hostage drama: revenge seeking employee straps on a ‘human bomb’ vest and threatens to detonate it at the jet fuel factory he was fired from, while holding a police detective’s wife. (Pretty stale stuff even then.) Coleen Gray & Stephen McNally keep their self-respect as the married couple under pressure, but inevitably become backdrops to Vic Morrow’s ‘white trash’ bomber who's located the Method Acting sweet spot between James Dean angst & Rod Steiger constipation. (With a blustery score to underline every motivational tic.) At least he’s something to watch! So too fine crepuscular lensing from Ernest Haller, a top Warners cameraman in the ‘30 & ‘40s (Bette Davis’s fave), who turns the nighttime location shooting into compelling abstract compositions: round holding tanks, encircling stairways, geometric shadows & metal pipeworks as obstacles at this complex complex. As to the drama, you’ve seen it before . . . and will again.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Blowing up yourself and a gas plant? Stick with James Cagney in WHITE HEAT/’49.

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A last thought before we go.

Well, enough from me. But before we sign off, here's a great quote from Emile Zola's L'OEUVRE (THE MASTERPIECE), which is about painting rather than the yet to be invented medium of film, but which points a fine critical eye toward the whole idea of art criticism. It's a good, if chilly, thought to keep in mind, especially when you surf the net.

"Has it ever struck you that posterity may not be the fair, impartial judge we like to think it is?

"Suppose the artist's paradise turned out to be as nonexistent as the Catholics, and future generations prove just as misguided as the present one and persisted in liking pretty pretty dabbling better than honest to goodness painting. There are some accepted masterpieces for which I myself wouldn't give a twopenny damn.

"Classical training has given us a wrong view of everything and forces us to acclaim as geniuses a lot of fellows who are no more than well-balanced, facile painters, while what we might really prefer is the work of more emancipated but less even artists known only to an initiated few. Immortality at present depends entirely on the average, middle-class mind and is reserved only for the names that have been most forcibly impressed upon us while we were still unable to defend ourselves...

"Perhaps that's the sort of thing that's best left unsaid. It's certainly the sort of thing that gives me the shudders!"- Emile Zola

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Now Over 5500 Reviews and (near) Daily Updates!

Saturday, October 3, 2020

HELL'S FIVE HOURS (1958)

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A last thought before we go.

DROP ME A LINE