A Cry in the Night (film)
| A Cry in the night | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Frank Tuttle |
| Produced by | George C. Bertholon Alan Ladd |
| Screenplay by | David Dortort |
| Based on | the novel All Through the Night by Whit Masterson |
| Starring |
Edmond O'Brien Brian Donlevy Natalie Wood Raymond Burr |
| Narrated by | Alan Ladd |
| Music by | David Buttolph |
| Cinematography | John F. Seitz |
| Edited by | Folmar Blangsted |
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| Distributed by | Warner Bros. |
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Release date
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Running time
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75 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
A Cry in the Night is a 1956 Film-noir, dramatic thriller film starring Edmond O'Brien, Natalie Wood and Raymond Burr. It was produced by Alan Ladd but does not feature him in the cast.
Eighteen-year-old Liz Taggart has gone to a lovers' lane with her boyfriend, Owen Clark, who has not yet been introduced to her parents. Unbeknownst to them, a psychopath named Harold Loftus has been watching them. Loftus knocks Owen unconscious and overpowers Liz, taking her to a shack.
A couple on a motorcycle try to revive Owen with liquor, but they leave when he doesn't wake up. Police arrive and mistakenly conclude that Owen is drunk. At the station, night-shift captain Ed Bates hears the story and realizes that Liz is the daughter of the day-shift captain, Dan Taggart.
While holding Liz prisoner, Loftus tries to force himself on her. Loftus' mother, Mabel, phones police when her son does not return home. Liz manages to get hold of Loftus' gun, but she finds it's not loaded.
Taggart is furious with Owen, blaming him for what has happened; but his wife scolds Taggart for intimidating their daughter to the point that she kept her relationship secret. When the police officers find the shack, Owen saves Taggart's life by leaping on Loftus at the last second. Taggart begins beating Loftus, who cries out for his mother.
After Loftus is taken into custody, Taggart invites Owen to accompany Liz back home.
The film was made for Alan Ladd's production company, Jaguar, despite Ladd not appearing in the cast. It was based on the novel "All Through the Night" by "Whit Masterson" (Robert Wade and Bill Miller) which had appeared in Cosmopolitan magazine. The New York Times described it as "an intensely compact book... and an unusually rich one" later saying it was one of the best films of the year.
According to Turner Classic Movies, a number of changes were made from the novel:
The girl in the book was knocked out early on and treated like a piece of furniture from then on. Her boyfriend wanted to help rescue her, but was sidelined by her bullying father, an unsympathetic brute in pursuit of an equally monstrous villain. There just wasn't much there for any actor to grab a hold of. David Dortort took the book's outline and reconfigured its details to make the characters more compelling: the sex fiend was now a repressed mamma's boy. This 32-year old virgin has no other way to spend time with a woman aside from abducting her to a secret lair. And the object of his rapacious attention would no longer be an unconscious object, but a girl equally frustrated by the smothering attention of an overprotective parent, and capable of recognizing some humanity in her attacker. The boyfriend would no longer be relegated to the margins of the story, but would join the father in the hunt, where the two would have plenty of dramatic tension and mutual disrespect crackling between them.
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Wikipedia