Cry Terror! (Andrew L. Stone Productions, MGM, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After the Father Brown episode I watched a quite interesting movie on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies even though it really wasn’t much of a film noir. It was called Cry Terror! (with the exclamation point) and was made by the independent production company of Andrew Stone and his wife Virginia, released through MGM. The Stones made this film after coming off the success of their previous film, Julie (which starred Doris Day and was made via her production company, Arwin, also for MGM release), and they came up with a doozy of a plot: Jim Molner (James Mason) owns a hi-fi shop when he’s approached by an old army buddy from World War II, Paul Hoplin (Rod Steiger). Hoplin asks Jim to make some bombs for him, promising him a government contract if he does, but the real reason Paul wants the bombs is he’s worked out an elaborate plot to extort money from the fictitious “20th Century Airlines” by planting the bombs on their planes, then calling the company’s CEO, Roger Adams (Carleton Young), and demanding $500,000 to tell him where the bombs are so they can be disarmed. Otherwise, the planes will blow up in mid-air and Adams will be responsible for all the lives lost. One plane in particular contains two bombs, and when the first one is discovered Chet Huntley (playing himself) shows it on TV and Jim recognizes it as his work. Later Paul Hoplin shows up at the home Jim shares with his wife Joan (Inger Stevens) and their daughter Pat (Terry Ann Ross; Mason’s real-life son Portland is also in the cast list, but he played a school friend of Pat instead of Pat herself; the Stones could have made the character a boy instead of a girl and allowed Mason fils to play his child!). Hoplin’s plot extends from San Francisco to Chicago to New York – and so did Stone’s shooting schedule: he always preferred to shoot on real locations rather than studio backlots.

Paul is pretty psycho but he’s also carefully worked out his plan, and among his associates are Eileen Kelly (Angie Dickinson), who planted the second bomb on the plane in Chicago and then got off the plane without going on to New York; Vince (Jack Klugman), identified only as “A Thug” on the cast list; and Steve (Neville Brand, older and seedier than he was in the original D.O.A. and Riot in Cell Block 11), a convicted rapist and Benzedrine addict (writer/director Andrew Stone was taking advantage of the loosening of the Production Code’s former flat ban on depicting drug addiction Otto Preminger had obtained to film The Man with the Golden Arm) who naturally goes after Mrs. Joan Molner. He’s only supposed to be guarding her, but he sexually assaults her and she successfully defends herself by stabbing him with a shard of broken glass from a window. Then she has to hide the body because she’s afraid that Hoplin will take it out on her if he realizes Steve is dead. Jim, meanwhile, is being held hostage by Vince and Kelly in her New York penthouse, only he figures out a way to escape by climbing down the elevator shaft – which means near-certain death if someone actually tries to use the elevator while he’s in the shaft. When Hoplin returns to the apartment where he’s holding Joan, he sees a New York Globe headline announcing that Jim and his daughter Pat are safe and have escaped the crooks, and that sends him ballistic. He chases Joan after she sneaks out of the apartment, and there’s a final scene inside a New York subway (though Stone actually shot the scene in a disused subway in Hoboken, New Jersey) in which Hoplin gets electrocuted by touching the third rail (well, it’s not quite as messy an exit as having him run over by a passing train) and Joan is pulled to safety just as she’s about to be run over by a passing train.

Cry Terror! isn’t really a film noir – only the final scenes at night even look noir, and the characters are either all-good or all-bad with none of the moral ambiguity of true film noir. But it’s also a quite good thriller if you can take the sheer preposterousness of the ending – to paraphrase Lewis Carroll, Andrew Stone was the sort of writer who had to write at least six impossible things before breakfast. It’s the sort of movie that later made Liam Neeson a late-in-life action star with his film Taken, much to his surprise (indeed, one could readily imagine a remake with Neeson in Mason’s role), though part of me wishes Stone had switched Mason’s and Steiger’s roles. Steiger’s overall appearance, especially the horn-rimmed glasses he wears, give him an Everyman appearance that seems more in line to be a milquetoast regular guy than a dastardly super-villain; while Mason, who the year after this film was made would play the role of his life as the dastardly super-villain in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, could have played the villain’s role here as well. The other quirky thing about Cry Terror! is how many of the bad guys went on to play law enforcers in their later roles: Steiger as the racist Southern county sheriff in In the Heat of the Night; Klugman as medical examiner Quincy in an NBC-TV series; and Dickinson as Sgt. Suzanne “Pepper” Anderson, the title character on Police Woman, also an NBC-TV series. But the real surprise of Cry Terror! is the superb, highly nuanced performance by Inger Stevens as Joan Molner. She was a troubled woman with various drug addictions and a penchant for seducing her co-stars, though throughout her career she was married to Black film producer Ike Jones but had to keep it a secret for fear that the revelation that she had a Black husband would have destroyed her career. But Inger Stevens’ tragic fate – she died of alcohol and barbiturate intoxication in 1970 at age 35, and her death was ruled a suicide – has overshadowed her career, and if her performance in Cry Terror! is any indication, she had real potential as an actress on which she didn’t live long enough to deliver.