Cry Terror!

I've suggested on quite a few occasions that MGM's B movies and programmers from the 1950s are a lot more interesting than most of the prestige movies they were putting out. Despite the cast, I don't think that I would consider Cry Terror! an A movie. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so the last time it aired I recorded it, and recently watched it to do a post here.

With passenger airplane travel becoming increasingly popular in the prosperous post-war US, the government was having to deal with the odd problem of crank callers putting in bomb threats to the various airlines. In one case that makes the live TV news, a plane had to make an emergency landing so that bomb disposal experts could find the bomb and detonate it, it being a device made from a super powerful explosive. However, the caller suggests that there are more bombs up in the air.

Watching this unfold on TV is New York electronics expert Jim Molner (James Mason). When he gets an up close look at the unexploded detonator, he's shocked: he designed it! Not that he was planning on putting bombs in airplanes himself, of course; he was approached by an old acquaintance from his military days named Paul (Rod Steiger) who fed Jim the lie that Paul was trying to get a contract with the government and that if Jim designed this detonator he'd be in line for a big payday.

Jim doesn't inform the cops of any of this, most likely because he suspects he'd be considered the real guilty party, although if he were on the phone long enough with them another call would come in while he was talking. Instead, Jim goes home to his wife Joan (Inger Stevens) out in the suburbs, to figure out what to do next. Unfortunately for him, Paul also figured Jim would do that, and Paul shows up to take Jim and Joan hostage, as well as their daughter when she gets home from school.

Paul takes them to another home somewhere in the suburbs where we meet the rest of the gang. Eileen (Angie Dickinson) is the woman who actually left the bomb in the plane and then took a different flight to New York; Vince (Jack Klugman) is in this probably just for the money; and Steve (Neville Brand), who has a problem with bennies, not only could use his share of the money but probably gets a thrill out of being violent too.

Paul separates Joan from the rest of the family after taking everybody to a separate unknown location where Eileen's apartment is. Jim tries to find a way to get out of the apartment, while Joan is the one responsible for getting the ransom money and delivering it to its desired location, with her husband and child being used as hostages if any funny business happens. Eventually, she gets left alone with Steve, which is a huge problem....

If there's one problem with Cry Terror!, it's that the movie was made under the Production Code, so we know that all of the baddies are going to get what's coming to them. The fact that Paul's otherwise meticulous plan depends somewhat on the competence of strangers (specifically Joan) is also a bit of a plot hole. But both of these can be fairly easily overlooked.

The cast is uniformly good. Steiger, surprisingly, isn't overacting one bit, which is somewhat unusual for him. But then, he's got Neville Brand to play another of his psycho thug roles, and Brand is quite good at it. Dickinson and Klugman are playing against type and do a more than adequate job of it. Mason, surprisingly, despite getting top billing, has less to do than it seems, while Stevens gets the most demanding role. It all works quite well and, while being nothing earth-shattering, will certainly entertain you for a good 90 minutes. There's also the big plus of all the location shooting, seeing Manhattan and the Bronx as they were in the late 1950s.

If you don't want to pay the price for a standalone Warner Archive DVD, Cry Terror! is still definitely worth looking out for the next time it shows up on TCM.