Jeopardy (Loew's, MGM, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Saturday, September 12) my husband Charles and I watched the latest presentation on Turner Classic Movies’s “Noir Alley” hosted by Eddle Muller. The film was Jeopardy (Muller couldn’t resist making jokes about the long-running TV quiz show of that title, even though the movie, unlike the series, doesn’t have an exclamation point after its name), and it was based on a radio play by Maurice Zimm, “A Question of Time,” aired on a series called Hollywood Star Playhouse on September 18, 1950. The film’s director was a young John Sturges (no relation to Preston), its writer was Mel Dinelli, and the stars were Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan (whom I liked a lot better as a good guy than the villain in Monogram’s late-1940’s thrillers Suspense and The Gangster), and Ralph Meeker. In his introduction Eddie Muller said he regarded Stanwyck as the all-time best actress in cinematic history, and I’d entirely agree with that: she had more versatility than any other female film star in the classic era and only one since then, Meryl Streep, has equaled her range. Alas, the film itself doesn’t rise to the level of Stanwyck’s performance. It casts her and Sullivan as married couple Doug and Helen Stilwin, who are vacationing in Baja California. They drive past the relatively big cities of Tijuana and Ensenada in search of a small fishing community where Doug used to hang out with his old buddies from the war (presumably World War II). Alas, the Stilwins have a typically cute, obnoxious movie kid, Bobby (Lee Aaker), who precipitates the crisis when he decides to go exploring on a seedy-looking old jetty despite the warning sign, “PELIGRO,” which of course Bobby doesn’t understand. (Neither does Helen; she has to ask her husband Doug what it means, and of course he tells her, “Danger.”) Bobby gets his foot caught in between two of the rotting old planks of the jetty, and Doug goes out to rescue him. Bobby emerges unscathed but Doug is not so lucky: the jetty collapses on top of him and he's trapped with a large steel piling pinning his leg in place and dooming him to drown as the tide rises unless he can be rescued within hours. Helen goes off in search of someone to help him after she breaks the car’s tire-changing jack in a futile attempt to use it to raise the piling enough to free her husband.

Unfortunately, the one man she runs into is a thoroughgoing villain, Lawson (Ralph Meeker), an escapee from prison and a psychopath who terrorizes Our Heroine (not that it’s that easy to terrorize a Barbara Stanwyck character!) and in one surprisingly graphic scene for a Production Code-era film makes it clear that his price for helping her rescue her husband is going to be not only her having sex with him but running away with him and allowing him to pose as Doug Stilwin. Lawson is still wearing his prison garb with a number across his back, though Charles found himself wondering just which side of the U.S.-Mexico border he’d escaped from. I assumed he was an American prisoner who’d crossed the border to flee from U.S. authorities, though Charles wondered if he’d committed his crime in Mexico. Certainly the Mexican police are mounting a major manhunt for him. Lawson becomes increasingly desperate as police car after police car, one of which he’s able to force off the road, goes chasing after him. Lawson finds a loaded pistol in the glove compartment of the Stilwins’ car and holds it on Helen, threatening to shoot her unless she follows his instructions. When Helen’s car gets a flat tire, Lawson is angry that the jack is missing – Helen having broken it in her attempt to use it to rescue Doug – but he jury-rigs a way to raise the right front fender so he can change the tire without one. (There’s a continuity glitch here: the car’s four tires are white-walled but the spare isn’t, though later when we see the car after the tire change all its tires are white-walled again.) Meanwhile, back at the dock, at one point a Mexican fishing boat passes the pier and Doug and Bobby try to call out to its crew to help rescue them, but the crew members think they’re just tourists, give them a friendly greeting, and pass on. There’s also a rather bizarre scene in which Bobby is frantically clinging to his dad despite his own danger of drowning with him, and Doug equally frantically tries to get his son to flee to safety. When Lawson and Helen reach the scene of the accident, Lawson follows through on his arrangement with Helen and rescues Doug, then tries to flee in her car. It gets another flat tire (it’s not surprising given how rough the roads in this stretch of Baja are and how frantically she’s been driving) and Lawson flees on foot. There’s a surprisingly open ending for a Code-era movie in that we’re not told definitively what happened to Lawson; Helen doesn’t mention him to the cops that finally pick up the Stilwins and take them back to civilization, and it’s unclear whether he’s shot down by the Mexican cops, taken alive, dies in the desert, or gets away.

In his intro, Eddie Muller compared Jeopardy to two other movies, Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), another Barbara Stanwyck vehicle adapted from a radio play (by Lucille Fletcher); and The Hitch-Hiker (1953), another film noir set in the Mexican countryside and dealing with two American tourists (both male and just buddies) played by Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy who are taken hostage while on a fishing trip to Baja by a fleeing criminal (played by William Talman, best known as the hapless prosecutor Hamilton Burger on the Perry Mason TV series). I’ve often said that such-and-such a classic movie would have been better with Barbara Stanwyck in it (Charles, with his quirky sense of humor, sometimes says that about films Stanwyck was actually in!), but Sorry, Wrong Number was one movie Stanwyck was in that I thought would have been better with someone else: Agnes Moorehead, who’d played the part on radio. Sorry, Wrong Number was also beset with the lamentable decision to “open it up” from the tight-knit half-hour radio play about a disabled woman who realizes through various phone calls she intercepts that her husband is trying to kill her to a sprawling 90-minute movie. Even though Fletcher did the adaptation herself, the long-winded explanations for who her husband is, why they got married in the first place, and why he now wants her dead just diluted the force of the radio original. (It also doesn’t help that the role of the husband cried out for John Garfield and got Burt Lancaster.) As for The Hitch-Hiker, it’s a far, far better movie than Jeopardy, creatively directed by Ida Lupino from a script by Daniel Mainwaring that added depth to the basic situation. One of Mainwaring’s clever touches is that the psycho hitch-hiker doesn’t know any Spanish but his two victims do, and as they travel through Mexico and have to deal with Spanish-speaking shopkeepers, clerks, and whatnot the hitch-hiker becomes paranoid that his victims will give him away by saying something the Mexicans will understand and he won’t. One thing I hadn’t known about Jeopardy was that it was Stanwyck’s comeback movie after a brief year-long retirement following Fritz Lang’s Clash by Night (1952), an adaptation of a Clifford Odets play that featured, as the second female lead, Marilyn Monroe. Lang recalled that Hollywood journalists visiting the set would push past Stanwyck in their eagerness to talk to “the young girl with the big tits,” though Monroe herself said throughout the remaining 10 years of her life that out of everyone in Hollywood’s previous generation, Stanwyck was the only one who had been nice to her and treated her with professional courtesy. Stanwyck finished Clash by Night and took an extended vacation to Europe, but within a year she was bored and eager to get back to work. It's only too bad she couldn’t have made her comeback role in a deeper, richer film than Jeopardy!