Obscure thriller lives again on Blu-ray

Obscure thriller lives again on Blu-ray

By Christopher P. Jacobs

It is not all that unusual to find some good acting and talented craftsmanship hidden away in otherwise forgettable movies that were made primarily to fill a movie screen for a week until the next release came out. Such a film is the moderately diverting crime thriller “Hell’s Five Hours” (1958), released to Blu-ray this past summer.

The low budget often shows through in this production from Allied Artists, which about five years earlier had become the renamed and reorganized successor to the old poverty-row Monogram studio. The sense of economy is most notable in the frequent use of stock footage and the limitation to only a few major sets (a house and the street outside, a small corrugated-steel office building and the surrounding rocket-fuel plant’s storage tanks and pipes) with a plot that takes place over a single night.

Nevertheless, the film is a well-shot (by the great Ernest Haller) and well-edited little thriller with decent performances, as well as presenting content that works on several levels beyond the basic action.

The tense nighttime setting and stark black-and-white cinematography give a strong film noir feeling, but the story barely touches on the typical noir themes other than a little bit on alienation and impending doom. These factors all help overcome the fairly routine plot that tries to exploit trendy interest in Cold War nuclear preparedness, the space age, terrorists, and sabotage, yet is really just a standard story of authorities dealing with a disturbed psycho who has taken hostages.

The film begins with a prologue, with a narrator discussing the modern age of rockets and the technology needed to keep the country prepared while we see stock footage shots of missile launches, government space facilities, etc. This seems tagged on, perhaps added for a reissue or early 1960s TV showings, and without it the film’s running time would be only about 76 minutes instead of the 80 minutes of this Blu-ray edition. Cutting out the prologue would make it much closer to the running time of 73 minutes that was noted in the original New York Times review and is published on the IMDb. This would also help keep the focus on the main plot rather than pounding home what in the film itself is a more subtle subtext that is not difficult to decipher when considering the era of the film’s production.

Once the main titles start, the movie wastes no time drawing the viewer into the story.

We see nighttime views of a small desert town with a rocket fuel plant as a mysterious intruder breaks through the security fence to steal something from a warehouse. At the same time the plant manager Mike Brand (the prolific but little-remembered Stephen McNally, who more often played villains than heroes) and his wife Nancy (Coleen Gray, who just died this past August at age 92 and is noted for several film noir classics) are putting their little boy (Ray Ferrell) to bed.

When the intruder gets away from the guards, the manager gets a call he’s needed at the plant, and the investigation begins. The FBI quickly gets involved after there’s been a phone threat to blow up the plant and they discover dynamite is all that’s missing, realizing that it seems to be an inside job and a touchy, suicidal employee named Nash (Vic Morrow, best-known for the TV series “Combat” and for his tragic accidental death while shooting the film version of “The Twilight Zone” in 1982) had just been fired several hours earlier by an abrasive foreman (Robert Foulk). One thing leads to another and Nash soon takes Nancy and the boy hostage and heads back to the plant with a homemade bomb strapped to his body.

“Hell’s Five Hours” could easily have become an even more obvious plot-driven film, but the script takes the time to flesh out some of the backstory of the major characters, especially Nash. They are effectively brought to life by the strong performances of Morrow and Gray, who largely carry the film once things start happening, with cross-cutting back to Brand and the police trying to get things under control.

While much of the plot plays out as a by-the-book procedural and the ultimate end is never truly in doubt, the film does its best to maintain suspense, and there are a few surprises here and there.

The four-minute prologue looks pretty bad, as if poorly upscaled and digitally processed from an old video master, besides consisting entirely of mediocre-quality stock footage with voice over narration asking the audience to think about the risks of the modern era. However, once the opening credits begin, much of Olive’s Blu-ray looks very good except for several out-of-focus shots (likely due to no budget for retakes) and a fair amount of stock footage (much of it depicting firefighters and spectators at night), which is slightly soft as well as several generations from the original.

The clarity of the Blu-ray’s HD image makes it easy to see the often extreme quality differences in the original source that would be obscured and barely noticeable in lower-resolution DVD, VHS, or online copies. The 1.78:1 widescreen HD transfer fits the image framing well. The audio is decent but there is some flutter and/or unsteadiness that is noticeable whenever the soundtrack includes music. As typical for Olive releases, there are no bonus features beyond a main and chapter menu.

HELL’S FIVE HOURS on Blu-ray – Movie: B- / Video: B+ / Audio: B+ / Extras: F