Split Second

Three escaped convicts take shelter in an abandoned town in the middle of the desert, bringing along the handful of people they seized on the way. Towards morning a problem surfaces: the town sits in the middle of a nuclear test range, and the detonation is only hours away. Everyone is watching the same clock. This was Dick Powell's first film as director, and it uses one of the strangest thriller ideas of the period: there is no way out and no locked door, only a clock counting down. The reckoning between the convicts and the hostages keeps changing shape as the shared danger grows. As a 1953 noir, it is one of the few to use the fear of atomic testing directly. It is short, hard, and its closing stays with you.