The Glass Wall (Columbia, 1953)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

TCM had a couple of interesting movies on its schedule after the Fleischer tribute, a little-known film noir from 1953 called The Glass Wall and a major and highly prestigious production, Being There (1979). The Glass Wall was co-introduced by TCM’s “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller and actress Dana Delany, who recalled working on a TV show with the veteran cinematographer Joseph Biroc, who shot The Glass Wall. The Glass Wall turned out to be an unexpectedly timely film about undocumented immigration, and one undocumented immigrant in particular: Peter Kaban (pronounced “Cuban”), played by Shelley Winters’ then-husband Vittorio Gassmann (who looks like someone’s odd attempt to cross-breed Robert Mitchum and Farley Granger; he’d have made a good leading man for Fellini but he seems wrong for this part), who was captured by the Nazis in his native Hungary in 1944, was sent to Auschwitz, escaped and joined the Resistance, where he hid out an American who was also on the run for the Nazis. He got on a refugee ship bound for the U.S. and applied for admission under a section of U.S. immigration law that allowed people to come in from Europe outside the national quota system (a feature of U.S. immigration law from 1924 to 1965 that set strict limits on who could emigrate to the U.S. from every country in the world; it was a specifically and quite openly racist law aimed at making sure immigration didn’t change America’s white-majority population mix, and Donald Trump’s immigration advisor, Stephen Miller, openly talked about reviving it) if they had helped the Allied war effort during World War II.

Peter did just that, only he can’t prove it because he knows nothing about the U.S. servicemember he rescued except his first name is “Tom,” he’s a clarinet player and he lives in New York City. Having lived his whole life either in small Hungarian villages or on the run, first from the Nazis and then from the Communists who took over Hungary after the war, Peter literally does not have any idea how large New York City is (indeed much of this movie, including the central character’s naïveté, reminded me of the 1931 Janet Gaynor musical Delicious, one of the finest early musicals and not just because George and Ira Gershwin wrote the songs for it, whose central character was also an undocumented immigrant in New York City fleeing from police and border-enforcement officials who want to deport her). He helps Maggie Summers (Gloria Grahame) after she’s chased by police for trying to steal a coat, telling her to crawl through the bushes in Central Park to avoid detection. He then invites himself to Maggie’s home – a room in a rooming house run by the typically officious landlady who’s threatening to throw her out because she’s $30 behind on her rent, and whose son is attracted to her and wants to rape her. Naturally Maggie assumes that Our Hero just wants to get in her pants – which he doesn’t, not only because he’s a decent guy but in his escape from the ship on which he was traveling and where he was going to be detained until it went on its return trip and deported him he was seriously wounded, only he doesn’t want to seek medical attention because that would mean he’d be reported to the police – and he gets the landlady off her back by giving her the $7 that was all the money he had. Unfortunately, getting – or keeping – the landlady’s son off her back is another story; in order to stop him from raping her, Peter has to grab a chair and hit him over the head with it (it was awfully convenient for Maggie’s furniture to include a breakaway chair!), thereby revealing his presence and getting both of them thrown out.

The film eventually resolves itself into a suspense thriller in which Peter’s and Maggie’s story (including her briefly turning herself into an unsympathetic character by stealing 20 cents from a pair of kid street buskers so he can have money to ride on the subways all night, a trick actually used by a lot of homeless New Yorkers at the time) is intercut with that of Tom (Jerry Paris, later Rob Petrie’s neighbor on the Dick Van Dyke Show) and his fiancée, Nancy (Ann Robinson). Peter’s story, complete with his photo, has made the cover of the New York Daily News (apparently this was a really slow news week!), and while he’s in the musicians’ union office waiting for a job Tom sees the paper, recognizes Peter instantly, and determines to find him and vouch for him even though that’s going to get in the way of the dream job he’s about to start with Jack Teagarden’s band. (Teagarden plays himself, but the music he performs is more “modern” than usually associated with him; it’s arranged by trumpeter-composer Shorty Rogers and features at least two important modern musicians from the L.A. scene, tenor saxophonist Jimmy Giuffre and drummer Shelly Manne.) As Peter and Maggie search virtually every New York night spot with a live band looking for the phantom clarinetist (including one scene, copied from the Laurel and Hardy movie Pack Up Your Troubles from 1932, in which they’re in a dance hall, they can’t see the band through the dancers, and when they finally can the band members, including the clarinetist, are Black), while the real Tom is so concerned about finding Peter he even bolts his dream gig with Teagarden mid-set and hooks up with Maggie and Bailey (Douglas Spencer, whom I recognized as the reporter from the 1951 version of The Thing), the immigration officer who at first was Peter’s Javert but switched sides when Tom told him Peter took a bayonet wound in the shoulder from a Nazi guard literally searching for them in a haystack but did not cry out, which would have given them away. The final suspense gimmick is that they not only have to find Peter, they have to do so before 7 a.m., when the ship he was on (and fled from) starts its return crossing and Peter legally becomes a fugitive from justice.

Peter finally hits on the idea of going to the United Nations building (which was still under construction when this film was made) and recognizes it by its glass exterior walls – until then I’d assumed the title was a reference to the invisible walls between countries, but it means the literal glass walls of the U.N. building. Only he’s there early in the morning, before anyone but the security guards and janitors are at work, and in a scene that manages to be both absurd and chilling he enters the empty room where the U.N. Commission on Human Rights meets and makes his plea for asylum to a room of empty chairs. He ascends two flights of stairs to the very top of the building (which is inaccessible from the elevators) and he’s about to jump off the roof and commit suicide when Maggie, Tom and Bailey arrive just in time and talk him out of it. Hosts Muller and Delany made great mention of the involvement of Ivan Tors, who co-produced this film and also co-wrote it with Maxwell Shane, its director. Tors has become the filmmaker animal-rights activists love to hate because he wrote and produced the Flipper movies and subsequent TV series, and Flipper has become a cause célèbre for people protesting the use of animals in entertainment – especially when the man who trained the various Flippers to play the role switched sides and came out with an article and several interviews about the cruel and disgusting things he had to do to those dolphins to get them to act.

But before Tors became associated with underwater films, he had an interesting record as a terrestrial producer, including two early-1950’s science-fiction films, The Magnetic Monster and Gog, which took place at a secret installation the U.S. government was supposedly maintaining in the southwestern desert for advanced research. He’d started out as a writer at MGM and worked on such unlikely projects as Song of Love, their 1947 biopic of Robert and Clara Schumann (Paul Henried and Katharine Hepburn); the 1949 Judy Garland-Van Johnson period musical In the Good Old Summertime and That Forsyte Woman, MGM’s oddball adaptation of the first installment of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte saga with Greer Garson and Errol Flynn (who turned in one of his best acting jobs). More to the point, Tors had also been an immigrant from Hungary and apparently some of his own run-ins with U.S. immigration authorities ended up in the script. And if The Glass Wall gets preachy at times, a film featuring an undocumented immigrant victimized by U.S. border policies, a woman threatened with rape from her landlady’s son, a stripper (Robin Raymond) who’s well into her 30’s, is raising two kids as a single mother and who’s sympathetic to Our Hero while her brother (Joe Terkel) screams at him and wants to turn him in sounds awfully current for our times. The main weakness in this movie is its star, Vittorio Gassmann, who just isn’t a strong enough actor to portray the tortured character; it’s a pity this film was made two years after the death of John Garfield and one year before the emergence of James Dean, two actors I thought of who would have been fully up to the role’s challenges.