Saturday, March 24, 2018

260. The Hostage

260. The Hostage (1967)
Director: Russell S. Doughten Jr.
Writers: Robert Laning from the novel by Henry Farrell
From: Cult Cinema

A little boy stows away in a moving van and witnesses the drivers disposing of a man they'd murdered the night before.

I’ll admit to being really nervous about watching this movie once I saw the description. It’s not that I feared any unsavory content; I was afraid that the movie would have a bad case of TGK: That Goddamn Kid—the insufferably precious and cringe-inducing child actor whose very voice, omnipresent throughout the film, would drive me up the wall. Once “Introducing Danny Martins as Davey” popped up on screen alongside the face that sold a thousand coat hangers, I grew even more apprehensive.

Fortunately the insufferable shit isn’t in much of the movie. Curiously, for being the titular hostage, there isn’t much hostage-taking or ransoming at all.

We start with a cold open on the two movers, Don Kelly and Harry Dean Stanton, killing a third man. Kelly is committing the murder while Stanton tries to stop him. We learn later in the movie that it was due to Kelly being in an alcoholic rage. Cut to credits and then Davey, miserable little shit, sitting at the window whining. He wants to go play in the park, but it’s too cold. His family is moving to a new house, but he doesn’t want to go so he’s being a brat about it. He trips his mom when she walks into the room with a box and, when sent to see his dad, kicks a box off the basement stairs. The narrative purpose of this moment is so we see Davey learn where his dad has packed the gun so he’ll have that info later, but the practical result is we’re hoping for a re-enactment of the Lindberg baby kidnapping so this family can once again be happy.

While Davey’s on his way to the basement, he runs into his neighbor Mrs. Mabry. He says he can’t hang out with her because his mom says she fibs and likes to talk about people. When Mabry pops into the apartment to offer to help at the last minute, the mother says all the work’s been done. Mabry goes back to her apartment and watches Davey hang around out front. The movers arrive as does a tramp living in the park played by John Carradine.

At this point, I’m going to go through each plot as opposed to running through the movie as a whole. The film’s curiously structured with most of the drama happening outside the main situation with the kid.

So Carradine says hi to the kid, watches him climb into the truck, and tries to tell him to get out. Then he walks downtown to visit a church to ask for help. After getting a little money, he goes to a bar. The father, who’s been looking for him, arrives, shouts his name, and Carradine runs into the street. He’s hit by a truck and taken to the hospital in critical condition.

The father was looking for him because, once the parents realize Davey is gone, Mabry tells them she saw Davey hanging out with a tramp in the park. She’s dining out on their misery and all the gossip potential here. She never says she saw Davey go into the truck or that he didn’t leave with Carradine. When the parents get a phone call saying Davey is with the movers, they hang Carradine’s hospitalization on Mabry and leave her miserable. Curiously, the movie tries to play her up to be as much, if not more, of a villain than Kelly who’s murdered a man and kidnapped their kid.

The phone call comes from a couple of farmers. Davey escapes the movers briefly, ends up at a farm, but is handed over to Kelly when Kelly claims to the be father. The farmwoman is unsure because of how violently Davey resists Kelly and tries to call the family. Her husband belittles her for always trying to get between fathers and their sons and we learn later that their son died when the father forced him out in the cold when he was sick. They see the boy’s picture in the paper, call the family, and tell them that the movers have him. Everyone assumes Kelly claimed to be the father just to simplify things.

Now, the movers and the kid, the things that are supposed to be the plot of the movie. Kelly and Stanton load up the truck and drive back to their place without knowing the kid is aboard. They take the body from their apartment, drive into the country to bury it, and this is the kid’s chance to escape. He knows they’re disposing of a body because the corpse was right in front of him. When the truck stops and the movers are dealing with the corpse, Davey gets out, walks over to where they are, and watches.

Kill the kid. Just fucking kill him.

He’s spotted, escapes them, gets spotted again down the road, escapes again, ends up at the farm. Now they tie him up in the back and Kelly locks Stanton in with him. Stanton tries to talk Davey down, convince him that they’re on the same side. They finally arrive at the new house and start unloading. Davey tells Stanton where the gun is and Stanton tells Davey to run when he gets the signal. Stanton and Kelly face off, Davey hears and…

walks to the house to watch instead of running.

Just kill the fucking kid!

Stanton gets killed, Davey is hunted through the house by Kelly, finds a successful hiding place that he then leaves to be caught by Kelly. They leave in the truck as cops arrive to find Stanton’s body. As the moving truck is approaching a police road block, Kelly stuffs Davey down onto the floor where Davey starts kicking at Kelly’s feet, causing him to lose control and crash. Davey’s removed from the truck, merely stunned, and Kelly’s dead. Family leaves together in an ambulance. THE END.

With all this description, you wouldn’t think the movie was under ninety minutes. Not only that, the movie manages to drag. The whole thing looked and felt inert. I kept waiting for the score to rise up as the movie faded to black because it felt so much like a TV movie. Even the music was all canned cues. There was just no energy to any of it.

Which is surprising because this wasn’t a half-assed production. The flick had some talent involved. Of course, Harry Dean Stanton is very good, but this is an early role for him so the producers likely didn’t realize what they had. Don Kelly was an established television actor, but this turned out to be his final role before dying. Then you have John Carradine who shows up in a lot of the movies on these sets, but was a qualified name when this movie came out. Plus, it was based on a book by the author of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? It didn’t need to be this bad.

And it’s not bad like the movies in this series that are a real pain to watch. It just constantly, in its own weird way, doesn't work. One factor, that I mentioned earlier, is that so much drama is happening outside the situation with Davey. That structure could work in a novel, a picaresque of different people’s pain as witnessed by this child running from his own situation. Everyone’s blinded to his need because of their own. That’s not communicated well in a movie, though, especially when it’s being structured as a thriller/chase. I mean, we have a digression of the farmers mentioning how their son died and that the wife now hates her husband. I wouldn’t be surprised to see that in a Wim Wenders movie, but it felt so out of place here. My only reaction was, so are we watching this movie now?

I don’t recommend it. The movie at least avoids the pitfalls of having the kid on screen too much, and maybe recognizing that he was terrible forced them to reconsider a lot of the movie. In the end, though, it’s boring, and not in any interesting way. It’s a just a movie whose parts didn’t come together.

No comments: