Word: thriller
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Seldom has a melodrama flashed so many tricks of the trade-pianos, radios, telephones, striking clocks, blinking lights, swinging doors, even false statements in the program. Yet The Closing Door is much more seriously written than the usual thriller and is full of clinical detail and therapeutic advice, some of it Freud and some of it scrambled. If this adds to the weight of the play, it only proves, in terms of good melodrama, a dead weight. Toward the end, however, as the adolescent events that poisoned Vail's life emerge simultaneously with the frightful method he took...
...lucky man who served his table. Almost every afternoon he wandered off by himself to see a "pictcha," a lonely figure who sought out movies he hadn't seen before, on Broadway or in the suburbs, without caring whether it was a cowboy film, a thriller, a musical, or good or bad. At dusk, he went to the dimly lighted cocktail lounge of the Madison Hotel, had a maximum of three Scotch & sodas, and made himself "available" again to anybody wanting to talk business...
What saves the film is the production-even the "thriller" section is handled with subtlety and fine acting. More important, the film was done with a skillful sense of humor. The dialogue is bright and witty, the comic relief sophisticated and highly effective. Throughout the tenseness of the investigation, one of the policemen persists in talking to the embassy in lumbering French, although they always reply in perfect English. And the come logic of a child's mind is played for its full charm. Bobby Henrey as Felipe gives the top performance of a well-acted movie. There is none...
...rest of their story sounds like a Pearl White thriller. When the group woke up in the morning they were covered with three inches of snow, and spent most of the day edging down the face. Then they started on the road back home--a seven-mile ice field called the Illecilliwaet Neve--through a blinding snowstorm and with only two cans of Spam and a handful of prunes for food. They were on it for 28 hours, and just had enough strength to effect rescue when one of the students fell twenty feet into a crevasse...
...Heaven, the fourth of these to be published in the U.S., ranks with his best. It has the excitement of a good spy thriller, but as in all Charles Williams' stories the figures in the chases and counter-chases are the fleshed souls of men & women, some striving to be saved, some bent on being damned. Not all readers will relish Williams' metaphysics, or find his book easy to follow. But most will know they have been in the company of a writer to remember...