Dial 1119

A young man escapes from a mental institution and comes into the city. The person he is after is clear: the psychiatrist who reported on him at his trial. On the way he kills a bus driver and walks into a bar. He takes the few customers there hostage. Outside the police gather and the negotiation begins. Gerald Mayer's seventy-five minute noir takes place almost entirely in one room. What is interesting about it is the hostages: each of them came there for a different reason, and under pressure they turn on each other. The television above the bar is broadcasting the siege live; the film uses that as an observation well ahead of its time.