BETWEEN A ROD AND A HARD PLACE........STONE'D THRILLS OF "CRY TERROR.!"

Cry Terror! (1958)   A round of BQ applause, please, for long lost writer-director Andrew L. Stone....

              Together with his wife/film editor Virginia, the Stones carved out their own little distinctive niche in 1950's cinema........

               This pair excelled in swift, improbable thrillers......ripped from the headlines and shot with a verisimilitude that deliberately avoided typical Hollywood artifice.....(fake backdrops, studio sets, blurry rear projection, etc, etc.....)

               In a Stone movie, if an actor's driving a car, he's really driving a car......with you in the backseat.......if it's an airplane cockpit, the pilots are real and they're really flying the plane......

               No fakery for the Stones.....whenever possible, they'd give documentary-like rawness to their footage......(A critic once cracked.....if the Stones had filmed the nuclear war-themed "On The Beach", nobody'd be left alive to review it.....)

                Andrew Stone's love of primal subject matter put his films ahead of the curve......"Julie" with Doris Day dealt with spousal abuse........for his ocean-liner disaster film "The Last Voyage", Stone partially sank a real ship....In Washington State, you can still visit the wreckage of a train crash Stone created for "Ring Of Fire", his forest fire opus......

                 And now we come to "Cry Terror!" which might very well be the first studio film to deal with domestic terrorism targeting airlines.....(keep in mind, we're talkin' 1958 here....)

                  Master psycho Rod Steiger tricks electronics repair guy James Mason into making the bombs Steiger plants on planes to extort $500,000 from the airline.  Steiger, giving the full
Steiger-licious repertoire of barely repressed rage and nervous tics, proceeds to terrorize Mason's  wife (Inger Stevens) and threaten to kill his little girl......all part of Rod's master plan to retrieve his big payoff....
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                 The one to watch here is that star-crossed starlet Stevens.......a kind of platinum blonde Natalie Wood, who, like Wood, did her best acting with her huge expressive eyes.  You fully feel her stark terror when Steiger leaves her alone with the worst of his gang, a Benzadrine-fueled rapist-murderer scarily played by Neville Brand.

                 At another location, Mason and his child are left at the mercy of two other Steiger minions, a whiny crook (Jack Klugman) and a lethal floozy (Angie Dickinson). Meanwhile, in true Andrew Stone attention to realism, the FBI painstakingly tracks Dickinson's whereabouts through her dental records.......taken from the gum she chewed while planting a bomb on a plane........

                Great, breathless stuff..........with a shocking, abrupt but satisfying fate doled out  to Steiger....

                Stone's career came to the oddest of conclusions.......after all these quick paced, you-are-there thrillers, he pumped out not one, but two lengthy, hefty musical biographies - "Song Of Norway" and "The Great Waltz".......both films bloated, ponderous, antiquated and thoroughly ridiculed.  They looked like movies made by someone who hadn't seen a movie himself since 1930......roadshow reserved seat musicals were already tar-pit dinosaurs by the time these came out......and these two turkeys finished off Stone as well........

                 But we can still revel in the semi-real thrills ' n chills of "Cry Terror"......it deserves a description not often applied to 1950's films.......it's a hell of a ride. 4 stars (****)