Fourteen Hours

A man steps out onto a ledge on the fifteenth floor of a New York hotel and stays there. Below, traffic stops, the fire brigade arrives and a crowd gathers. A traffic policeman starts talking to him and he will speak to nobody else. Hours pass. The people below start betting. The subject is not suicide but the life that collects around the event. The film keeps going back down: taxi drivers place bets, a couple meets for the first time there, a woman decides on her divorce there. The man above becomes less an event than a mirror. The form is close to real time and built on one location. The camera moves between the ledge and the street; the sense of height is built with genuine high-angle photography rather than sets. The source is a real case: a man who spent hours on a hotel ledge in New York at the end of the thirties was widely covered in the press and the screenplay rests on that file. Grace Kelly appears in a small role, her first film. Paul Douglas plays the policeman, Richard Basehart the man on the ledge and Barbara Bel Geddes his fiancée. Henry Hathaway directs. Who it is for: viewers who like suspense from real events and single-location structures. Who it is not for: anyone the subject will strain; the film stays out of detail but sustains the tension to the end.