The riveting final twelve minutes of the 1952 film noir Sudden Fear is movie perfection. Now, it’s a pretty good movie for the first hour and thirty-eight minutes, but its ending takes Sudden Fear up a couple of notches.
Here’s the set-up – a highly successful woman (Joan Crawford) marries a guy (Jack Palance) who really just wants her money; he plots with his longtime girlfriend (Gloria Grahame) to do in his wife for the inheritance. The wife discovers their scheme, and plans to get them before they can get her.
The wife has sneaked into an apartment when the husband unexpectedly returns, and she becomes trapped and defenseless in a closet, just hoping against hope that he won’t discover her. The tension mounts as he putters around the apartment, and there’s an ingenious use of a wind-up toy to build even more suspense. After several excruciating minutes, her cover is blown, and she manages to bolt. As she runs for her life through the hilly sidewalks and alleys of San Francisco, he careens after her in a large sedan.
In this extended sequence, there’s almost no dialogue except for his yelling her name. The storytelling rises to the level of Hitchcock’s, and the storyboard could be taught in film school.
Director David Miller directed over forty features, many with big stars (Billy the Kid with Robert Taylor, Flying Tigers with John Wayne, Twist of Fate with Ginger Rogers, and The Story of Esther Costello with Crawford and Two decades later, he directed another thriller, the cheesy and tasteless conspiracy movie Executive Action with Burt Lancaster. But there’s nothing in his body of work that would indicate that Miller could create those twelve minutes of perfection in Sudden Fear.
Miller had a lot of help from cinematographer Charles Lang, who makes the best of the shadows and the natural Dutch angles of San Francisco’s sloped streets. Lang went on to shoot two of the most iconic film noirs, Ace in the Hole and The Big Heat. Lang had lots of ucess outside the noir genre, too: The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Some Like It Hot, The Magnificent Seven, One-Eyed Jacks, The Flim-Flam Man, Wait Until Dark. Lang was nominated for an Oscar for his work in Sudden Fear, as were Crawford, Palance and costume designer Sheila O’Brien.
I’m not a big Joan Crawford fan, but even I recognize the power of her best two scenes here. In the first, she silently listens to a conversation between the two plotters, and her face registers the changing emotions as she connects the dots. In he climactic scene, she recognizes what she can and cannot do, and changes her course of of action, but then, initially frozen with terror, must rally herself to escape from her husband. The sequence concludes with a final close-up that is vintage Joan Crawford.
Palance, oozing physicality and intensity, is perfectly cast. Grahame, whose performance is very understated next to Crawford’s and Palance’s, is excellent.
Sudden Fear can be streamed from Amazon, AppleTV, YouTube, Fandango and is free on kanopy; it also occasionally plays on Turner Classic Movies.
