Home invasion thrillers make me uneasy, yet even I had difficulty losing myself in 1955’s The Night Holds Terror. The night may hold some tension and terror, but the days turn out to be tedious and eye-rollingly ridiculous.
As the opening narration goes to great pains to inform the audience, this is based on a true story. The very first thing we see are the husband, wife and two kids who will be portrayed here. Given how the husband is so ridiculously portrayed by Jack Kelly here, I’m not sure I’d want my image or real name associated with this production.
Kelly is an odd character in this, a towering pillar of jelly. The first wrong move he makes is picking up a hitchhiking Vince Edwards, which happens during the opening credits. Conversation in the car between the two quickly degrades, as Edwards draws a gun and orders Kelly to drive down an abandoned road in the desert. I assume it had to be a different dirt road than the one in Manos: The Hands of Fate, yet I kept waiting for him to arrive at Valley Lodge and be greeted by Torgo.
Instead, a second car which has been tailing them. John Cassavetes, to my rather considerable surprise, emerges from it. His directorial debut, Shadows, was still three years in the future and his most high-profile acting role, in Rosemary’s Baby, thirteen years away. He is impossibly young here and, frankly, his performance is terrible. The third member of this gang is David Cross, younger and with more hair than you’ve ever seen him before, and that’s because this is a different actor, one who is in a movie almost a decade before the Mr. Show star was born.
Anyhoo, Kelly doesn’t get killed out in the desert, as a preposterous plan is hatched to sell his car, with the trio of fugitives splitting the money. The three hoodlums and Kelly go to the dealer where he bought the car. The man is willing to buy it back, but he won’t have the cash until the next day. Does Kelly try in any way to alert anybody? Does he at least run off? Does he try to slip a note to the dealer? He doesn’t do any of these things.
In voiceover, he keeps saying things like, “Once again, I had an overwhelming urge to run”, yet he does nothing each and every time. At most, he tries to appeal to the better nature of the hoodlums, which they do not have. He keeps saying that, if they would let him go, he won’t tell anybody. I lost count of how many times he says, “You can take my word for it!”, as if that means anything. Once the gang settles in at his home, wife Hildy Parks will say that a lot as well. She has barely more backbone than her husband.
There are various crises Kelly and Parks will have to deal with, various friends and neighbors stopping by unexpectedly and having to be harried away with as much tact as possible. One that amused me was a woman who stopped by because Parks had borrowed some cigarettes from her earlier that day. Why did she come by? Was she there to collect the butts?
The plot is basically various silly cat and mouse games between the criminals and our alleged heroes. Cassavetes, in particular, does such childish things as putting a slip of paper between the receiver and the body of the phone to ensure Parks doesn’t use it while he and the others are out of the house. The single most ridiculous contrivance has the police installing a special decoder in the family’s TV and broadcasting on an unused channel a live feed of mug shots for Parks to review.
Nobody in the cast fares especially well, but I don’t know who could deliver even a mediocre performance, given this material. Edwards may fare the best, if only because he has the physique to be the muscle of the group. Also, he doesn’t have to say much. While he was delivering a line, I happened to look down while taking a note and I realized he sounds a bit like Joe Mantegna. Cross is interesting, if only because he looks a bit like a young Nicholas Cage trying to channel Elvis. On an unfortunate note, the worst performance here is Nancy Zane as the daughter in the family, and it is one of the worst performances by a child I have seen in any picture. A surprise appearance is Barney Phillips, who briefly appears as the car dealer, and who I always associate with the Twilight Zone episode “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?”
I will strain to find anything positive to say about this picture, and the best I think of the family’s house, which is either a real location or somebody really did a great job making a set appear lived in. In its best moments, the movie has the feel of a documentary, such as a scene in the kitchen which is a locked-down shot behind columns.
The weirdest element of the picture is the overbearing narration, especially when it goes into painstaking detail over the process by which a police department memo gets circulated. I assume we hear about every single step in that process, including where the copies go to, and how one is put on a conveyor belt that ends in the police bullpen. Part of this covers the minutiae of switchboard operation to the extent I felt I had watched a training film for the job and could probably work in one now.
If it was any better, The Night Holds Terror would remind me more of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. At least, both have a family held hostage by a group of deadly criminals and who make little effort to defend themselves. In the end, I’m not curious about why Kelly picked up Edwards at all. Between Edwards’s leather jacket, and how Kelly is soon drinking at a bar with them, was he cruising at the time? Kelly is their hostage, but I wondered he if he wanted to be their gimp.
Dir: Andrew L. Stone
Starring Jack Kelly, Hildy Parks, Vince Edwards
Watched as part of the Mill Creek box set Noir Archive Volume 2: 1954-1959