Make Haste to Live (1954) User Reviews

Southwestern noir grows muddled, implausible

[bmacv · 6/10 · 11 March 2002]

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.

Woman in the Fog.

[hitchcockthelegend · 5/10 · 29 November 2014]

Make Haste to Live is directed by William A. Seiter and adapted to screenplay by Warren B. Duff from the novel written by Gordon and Mildred Gordon. It stars Dorothy McGuire, Stephen McNally, Mary Murphy and Edgar Buchanan. Music is by Elmer Bernstein and cinematography by John L. Russell.

A gangster is sentenced to prison for killing his wife, but she isn't dead, she's alive and well and raising her daughter in New Mexico. It's now 18 years later and he's out of the big house; and he wants revenge!

Elmer Bernstein's superb musical score opens up the picture and Russell uses film noir filters to photograph the gripping opening sequences. It's a handsome beginning, the promise of a film noir gem is palpable, sadly the entire middle hour is plodding in pacing and ridiculous in plotting. There's some neat touches, McNally is permanently angry and sinister, which makes for good fun, McGuire works hard to maintain interest, Buchanan's gruff sheriff steps outside of the norm and the odd scene, such as that involving a fairground, have noirish leanings. The finale as well is of high quality, but patience is tested throughout and there's the over riding feeling that the cast, Bernstein, Russell and the audience deserve a far better script. 5/10

Slow thriller!

[JohnHowardReid · 6/10 · 10 December 2017]

Dorothy McGuire (Crystal Benson), Stephen McNally (Steve), Mary Murphy (Randy Benson), Edgar Buchanan (sheriff), John Howard (Josh), Ron Hagerthy (Hack), Pepe Hern (Rudolfo Gonzales), Eddy Waller (Spud Kelly), Carolyn Jones (Mary Rose), Argentina Brunetti (Mrs Gonzales).

Director: WILLIAM A. SEITER. Screenplay: Warren Duff. Based on the 1950 novel by Mildred Gordon and Gordon Gordon. Photography: John L. Russell Jr. Film editor: Fred Allen. Music: Elmer Bernstein. Art director: Frank Hotaling. Set decorators: John McCarthy Jr, George Milo. Costumes: Adele Palmer. Make-up: Bob Mark. Special effects: Howard Lydecker, Theodore Lydecker. Optical effects: Consolidated Film Industries. Hair styles: Peggy Gray. Assistant director: Robert Shannon. Sound recording: Earl Crain Sr, Howard Wilson. Associate producer: William A. Seiter. Executive producer: Herbert J. Yates.

Copyright 4 March 1954 by Republic Pictures Corp. New York opening at the Victoria: 25 March 1954. U.S. release: 1 August 1954. U.K. release: 19 April 1954. Australian release through 20th Century-Fox: 22 September 1954. Sydney opening at the Park (ran one week). Approx. 8,100 feet. 90 minutes.

SYNOPSIS: Dorothy McGuire plays the successful editor of a small town paper in New Mexico. Her security, and the happiness of her teenage daughter, are threatened when her husband is released from jail.

COMMENT: An attractively photographed and appealingly acted thriller which suspense-fully builds to a fine climax. Both principal antagonists are perfectly cast, and it's good to see Mary Murphy in an early role, even if she has little to do. The director makes effective use of his locations. All told, it's a neat job.

MY SECOND VIEW: Slow thriller. The script is over-weighted with dialogue and yet it doesn't succeed in generating much interest in the principal characters (and none at all in the subsidiary ones). Part of the fault lies in the casting — none of the principals are very convincing — and an even greater part in the ponderous direction. Something might have been made of the climactic chase sequence but it drags on far too long to retain interest and the sets are too obviously tatty.

Unclear to me

[recluse2 · 6/10 · 26 November 2018]

I didn't really understand what the ex-con ex-husband "had" on the main character and what he was trying to do to her and her daughter. I did like the small Western town setting with the Indian Ruins excavation site and the idea of her attempting to escape via the chartered plane, the suspense and down-to-the-wire excitement. And the villain was a menacing character.

Nonetheless

[boblipton · 6/10 · 13 January 2020]

Eighteen years ago, Dorothy McGuire was married to Stephen McNally, who turned out to be a very bad man. After he had beaten a murder rap and he had hit her, she ran away. By happenstance, a different woman was blown up in their home, he was convicted of murdering Miss McGuire - apparently the corpse was in teeny-tiny pieces - and sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Miss McGuire moved to a small town in the desert, raised their daughter to become Mary Murphy, and publish and edit the local paper. Now, however, McNally has gotten out of prison. He's tracked her down and intends to punish her.

I can't really blame him. She couldn't have sent a picture of herself holding a current newspaper?

Despite this and other holes in the plot, this is a very entertaining movie, half soap opera, half crime drama, with some very engaging performances among the leads, and Edgar Buchanan just right as the canny local sheriff. William A. Seiter's last movie as director is no world-beater because of the plot holes, but John Russell's camerawork around Taos, New Mexico, and an early Elmer Bernstein score help to burnish this movie into a pretty good one.

Make Haste to Live (1954)

[MartinTeller · 3/10 · 3 January 2012]

When her gangster husband is paroled, a woman fears for herself and her teenage daughter. Sounds like a good "out of the past" premise, but turns out to be a tepid thriller. There are brief hints of danger but they fizzle out, with Stephen McNally being a rather non-threatening presence and Dorothy McGuire uneven in her characterization. One minute she's haunted by nightmares, the next she seems quite comfortable with the situation. This thing just has no guts to it. What kind of movie teases the audience with a bottomless pit and then denies them the payoff? I've heard of Chekhov's Gun, but Chekhov's Hole? A nice score by Elmer Bernstein is wasted on this humdrum do-nothing picture.

Started out good.

[marjot · 4/10 · 13 August 2002]

I expected "Sleeping with the Enemy" but this wasn't it. The tension wasn't there. I just wasn't afraid for the good guys or scared of the bad guy. I had hoped that the bottomless pit shown in the opening scene would play a bigger part, but it didn't - and it would have made a grand finale! But the ending was very disappointing!

This film just doesn't make sense....so why did they leave the script like this??

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 1 April 2018]

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.

Panning a Dorothy McGuire movie is like rooting for the hunter who shot Bambi's mother, but.....

[mark.waltz · 1/10 · 10 October 2017]

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".

I really wanted to like this

[ChelseaCat · 1/10 · 31 March 2018]

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.

Dorothy McGuire battles an awful script. And loses.

[blanche-2 · 5/10 · 3 December 2021]

Dorothy McGuire gives a strong performance in "Make Haste to Live" from 1954.

McGuire plays Crystal Benson, who runs the newspaper in a small Colorado town. She has a beau, Josh (John Howard) and a daughter Randy (Mary Murphy). When Randy reports that she met a man who said she reminded him of her mother, Crystal panics. She gets a gun from the sherriff's office, hands Randy's boyfriend $1000 to keep safe for her, and makes a recording explaining the situation to her daughter.

It turns out Crystal was married to a vicious criminal, Steve (Stephen McNally) who was accused of killing someone. Crystal, with the help of a good friend, Mary (a blond Carolyn Jones) escapes from him. Later on she finds out that Steve brought a woman home, and the house blew up. Police believed it was Crystal, and while cleared of the first murder, he went to prison for one he didn't commit.

Nineteen years have passed, and Steve has shown up, realizing Randy is his daughter. He befriends Randy, and Crystal passes him off as her brother. Meanwhile, she's desperate to escape again.

Someone posted on IMDb that panning a Dorothy McGuire movie is like applauding the person who killed Bambi's mother, but I must say, this is lousy. First of all, Steve meets Randy and she reminds him of her mother? In what universe?

Also you just want to throttle the McGuire character. Why not just tell everyone he's no good and have the sherriff and her boyfriend pressure him to get out of town? Or tell Randy the truth - so her father is a psychopath, that doesn't make her one.

Not only that, we're shown something in the beginning that we assume (wrongly) will play into the final denoument. It doesn't. That makes the whole thing contrived.

I saw Dorothy McGuire on stage in Night of the Iguana. A wonderful actress. Skip this.

A threat hanging on my head.

[ulicknormanowen · 5/10 · 21 June 2022]

The best part is the first : one does not know why Dorothy macGuire awakes in fear at night,why she's so frightened,why she entrusts a hefty sum of money to someone she can depend on; when one learns the reason why ,it's a little disappointing and derivative ; the screenplay does not make any sense and Stephen McNally's - although ideally cast as the villain- motives are not clearly defined ; for good measure ,there's even a love rivalry a la "imitation of life" between mother and daughter,which is rather ludicrous ,in this case!

The use of the Indian excavations ,particularly the funeral chamber , redeems somewhat the movie in the last scenes .A good beginning and a suspenseful ending ,you make it on the percentages ,but lose out on the bonuses: average.