I just watched a thriller on TCM called Count the Hours, a 1953 RKO “B” whose opening scene bears a striking resemblance to In Cold Blood, the famous story of a real-life case in which an isolated farmer and his housekeeper were murdered for the money he had stashed on the farm — even though Count the Hours was made a full six years before the murders detailed in In Cold Blood took place. The major differences between Count the Hours and the opening of In Cold Blood is that the farmer has no children — just a woman who’s working as a live-in housekeeper who’s killed along with him — and he really does have a cash stash. Produced by Benedict Bogeaus, directed by Don Siegel, and photographed in nine days by the great cinematographer John Alton — who must have been miffed to be back in the “B” salt mines just two years after winning the Academy Award for shooting the spectacular ballet sequence at the end of An American in Paris (he had to share the award with Alfred Gilks, who shot the rest of An American in Paris, but the big, visually stunning scene everybody remembers was Alton’s work)— Count the Hours emerges as a nice little vest-pocket thriller largely in the Hitchcock mold, though with the difference that the innocent man wrongly accused of the murders is in custody almost from the get-go and, as in the Cornell Woolrich stories Phantom Lady and Black Angel, it’s an outsider working on his behalf who ultimately proves his innocence. The central character of Count the Hours is attorney Doug Madison (Macdonald Carey), who’s appointed by the court to defend hired man George Braden (John Craven) in his trial for murdering his former employer, farmer Fred Morgan (Richard Kipling — presumably no relation), and his housekeeper Susan Watson (Kay Riehl).
The case against Braden seems to be
open and shut, especially since he confessed to the crime after a grueling
16-hour interrogation in order to get the police to let his wife Ellen (Teresa
Wright, top-billed and appearing here a decade after working for the real Hitchcock in Shadow of a Doubt, one of the Master’s finest films) go. When he’s first
questioned by police George denies he owns a gun; later he decides to come
clean about having one — and it’s a .32, the same caliber as the one the
murders were committed with — but in one of the dumbest moves imaginable
(though the script by Doane R. Hoag and Karen DeWolf makes us understanding
that she’s only trying to help), Ellen throws the gun in the nearby lake. It’s
eventually recovered — after Ellen is the victim of an attempted rape by the
diver hired by Madison to find it — but by the time it’s found the inside of
the barrel has rusted so badly it’s no longer possible for ballistics tests to
prove it either was or wasn’t the murder weapon. George is convicted and
sentenced to death, and it’s clear that the people in the small town where all
this is happening would just as soon lynch him and not bother with a trial at
all (one imdb.com reviewer compared the story to To Kill a
Mockingbird and Madison to Atticus Finch,
but since all the dramatis personae
are white it doesn’t have the complicating racial politics of
Mockingbird), but one of the townspeople
most incensed at George for killing the well-loved Morgan lets slip that
there’s another suspect, Max Verne (Jack Elam, looking oddly like Abraham
Lincoln and even speaking in the high, scratchy voice Lincoln was supposed to
have had — a Lincoln film with Elam is an interesting cinematic
might-have-been), who had the job of Morgan’s hired hand before George did and
threatened Morgan when he fired him in a dispute over money. Madison is
instantly convinced that Verne broke into Morgan’s farmhouse to steal the money
and killed Morgan when the old man surprised him with a gun of his own, and
eventually Verne is arrested by the sheriff of a neighboring county and makes a
confession to the crime. (So we now have two people who’ve essentially been browbeaten by law
enforcement into confessing to the same crime; given the current controversies
about police interrogations leading to false confessions, this part of Count
the Hours seems modern now.)
But Madison’s attempt to get George freed runs into
a trap set by the district attorney, Jim Gillespie (Edgar Barrier): Gillespie
produces Dr. Ronald Seabright (Norman Rice), who runs the local mental hospital
and has had Verne as a patient. He assures the court that Verne is non-violent
but would confess to anything if he got excited enough, and Madison — who’s
also lost his law practice and his well-to-do fiancée, Paula Mitchener (Dolores
Moran, the other “new girl” introduced in the 1945 film To Have and
Have Not but who didn’t have the
illustrious career Lauren Bacall did; maybe if she’d been the one who married the male lead … ), who’s
got tired of waiting for him and enduring all the town gossip that the only
reason he’s pushing George’s case so hard is he’s got the hots for Ellen — is
about to give up on the day before George’s scheduled execution (which the
governor has already refused to delay) when he sees Max Verne having an
argument and grabbing his girlfriend, teenage bombshell Gracie Sager (Adele
Mara), who’s essentially doing the Carroll Baker schtick three years before Baker’s first lead role in Baby
Doll. Eventually, as Madison and Ellen are
in a bar together just before he’s going to leave town, he hears the piece of
information he needs: the bartender says he heard Max Verne yelling about the
murders at 6 a.m. the day they happened — even though the bodies weren’t
discovered until 7:30. Ultimately there’s a shoot-out, Verne is taken alive and
the cops find Morgan’s wallet on him (they know it’s Morgan’s because his name
was helpfully embossed on it); George is freed in the nick of time and Madison
and Paula get back together as the film ends.
Count the Hours was shot in only nine days, but it eventually
acquired a cult reputation even though, when he saw it again in the late
1960’s, Siegel didn’t think it was that great — “the nine days showed,” he
laconically told interviewer Stuart M. Kaminsky. It’s a problematic film in
several ways, notably the relentless overacting of Jack Craven and the almost
as relentless overacting of Teresa Wright (yet another actor whom Hitchcock got
to calm down!), but what makes it
is Siegel’s taut direction, MacDonald Carey’s laconicism as the crusading
attorney (one could make a case that the character is a precursor of Atticus
Finch, but one could also make a case that Carey played him better than Gregory
Peck did, without the sometimes insufferable self-righteousness Peck showed in Mockingbird that marred an otherwise fine performance) and,
above all, the magnificent cinematography of John Alton. Siegel recalled to
Kaminsky that when Alton signed on to make the film, he asked producer Bogeaus
how much he had budgeted for rigging, the system of overhead pipes, brackets,
ropes and cables that suspends lights over a film set. Bogeaus told him $4,000.
“Give me $2,000 above my salary and I won’t use any rigging,” Alton said. He
did it by using almost no overhead lighting at all, contributing to the film’s
rich visual atmosphere.
