Andrew L. Stone

  • The Night Holds Terror (1955)

    The Night Holds Terror (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) To find interesting movies in Hollywood history, it pays off to get away from the classics and take a look at the B-grade material that was also produced at the time. Forced to work without the lavish budget of bigger productions, those second-rate filmmakers had to be inventive and stick closer to reality than the lavish spectacles that headlined theatres. So it is that The Night Holds Terror does a few really interesting things. For one, it tackled a home-invasion premise that seems to belong to later decades rather than the image we hold of the mid-1950s. For another, writer-director-producer Andrew L. Stone uses a lot of practical location shooting as a substitute for studio sets, managing along the way to portray a sense of realism that also feels ahead of its time. Thirdly, it goes into its story with a procedural mindset, using narration and plenty of exposition footage to show us policemen using then-high technology to close the net around the criminals. Speaking of which — the most likable of those hoodlums is played by John Cassavetes, years before striking out on his own as a director. Adapted from a real story to such a degree that the criminals sued the production company (which led to a courtroom hearing where the victim punched one of criminals in the face), The Night Holds Terror does feel a bit more immediate and more contemporary than similar films of the era.

  • The Last Voyage (1960)

    The Last Voyage (1960)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) It’s fascinating to dig into movie history and find early precursors of later trends. The disaster movie isn’t new and traces back its roots to silent cinema, but the very specific strain of 1970s disaster movies has a clear predecessor in 1960’s The Last Voyage, in which an aging ocean liner suffers catastrophic damage and starts to sink, trapping one of our protagonists under a steel beam. It’s not a perfect example of the form that Airport would formalize a decade later, but it’s close enough. It doesn’t get completely crazy like The Poseidon Adventure, but the intensity of the disaster steadily grows throughout the film—and the end sequence in which the survivors walk, then waddle through a progressively sinking promenade deck is suitably intense, made even more urgent by the very long duration of the shot. Perhaps the best decision made by writer-director Andrew L. Stone was to rely on an actual ocean liner destined for destruction as backdrop for The Last Voyage—the ship feels old and past its glory, making for an interesting change from most ocean disaster films taking place on maiden voyages, and imparting quite a bit of faded golden-age atmosphere to the aged sets. Robert Stack decently plays a father trying to rescue his beam-trapped wife and keep his daughter calm—it’s a prototypical tough guy’s role, and he gets it. Meanwhile, Dorothy Malone does well in a role that has her stuck on the same set for most of the film, eventually with the complication of rapidly rising water. George Sanders is also remarkable as the ship’s captain, whose bad decisions only make a bad situation even worse. The suspense builds up despite being based on very familiar elements, and the colour cinematography helps in making the film feel closer to its 1970s inheritors. The Last Voyage is still a remarkably effective watch, even more so for being somewhat specific in its thrills, and not seeking to overwhelm viewers with a CGI frenzy of exploding stuff.