(1956)
2.5
Nathan Southern
Alex Segal's 1956 low-budget thriller Ransom! hides behind its two-dimensional kidnapping premise as a smokescreen. The film's roots run deeper than an abduction -- so much so that the kidnapping, in retrospect, appears a mere afterthought. Segal and his co-writers (Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum) build the gestalt of their story around David G. Stannard (Glenn Ford), a deeply flawed and errant father figure, who is not only morally impure (he pilfers lumber for his son's clubhouse, illicitly, at a knocked-down cost) but who runs his vacuum cleaner entrepreneurship second-in-command to the older brother to whom he has felt inferior since childhood. To overcompensate for his deep-seated feelings of inferiority, Stannard throws himself into an insane risk following his son's abduction (promising the abductors on television that they will never see a cent of the ransom, and swearing a Bible oath to use the cash as a ransom on their heads), which of course propels the man into a head-to-head battle of wills against his older brother, who thinks him insane. ("I'm sorry for you," the elder moans, "...on so many levels.") In this sense, Stannard presages Nick Nolte's Sam Bowden in the 1991 Scorsese remake of Cape Fear by 35 years. To call Stannard "less than sympathetic" would be an understatement; he is seriously disturbed and even, arguably, ghastly. Segal's heart lies in the right place -- the psychodramatic prospect of Stannard wrestling with his own demons is far more fascinating than a Z-grade kidnapping plot -- but the child's murder would be a far more logical conclusion to the father's tumultuous inner struggle. (God, how it would have infuriated viewers had it stuck to its guns!) Ransom! suffers from its lack of dramatic momentum throughout; the preponderance of the film asks the audience to sit on folded hands and watch as Stannard cracks up and his wife, Edith (a shattering performance by Donna Reed) teeters on the edge of breakdown, which fails to generate adequate suspense. The flaw may lie, partially, in the producers' decision to lengthen the drama by appending footage onto it. (Segal originally shot an abbreviated version of Ransom! for network television). But the lengthened picture retains two powerful sequences: the weakened and bed-bound Edith's tender atmospheric recollections of the young Stannard's birth and the parents' onscreen discovery of the bizarre kidnapping attempt, which -- because it emerges beneath such an innocent masquerade (a phony nurse arriving at the school to pick the child up for medical tests) -- hauntingly echoes the latent depravity in 1950s Middle America (as evidenced by serial killers Glatman, Starkweather, Beck-Fernandez), with its eerie sociological parallels to morally schizophrenic Victorian England.
cast-crew for Ransom on AllMovie
Ransom (1956)
