A Hungarian holocaust survivor smuggles himself into the US where "there is work everywhere"only to find a social system as cold as the Stalinist state he left. Magnificent, expressionistic on-location cinematography bring 1950s New York alive as a kind of Noir feme-fatale in city form. The last scenes, in an abandoned UN building that seems an incarnation of empty promises, are spectacular.
There's lots of strikingly progressive depictions here for an American film from the early 1950s, even what might be a sympathetically depicted inter-racial couple.The marginalization of women under patriarchy and work place sexual harassment are tackled in this film many years before Hollywood broadly began to address issues of sexism. Even with the film's implicit anti-communism, it wouldn't surprise me if several of the filmmakers went on to get blacklisted.
The only criticism I'd make is that there is some rather ham fisted speech making by the two main characters. But their desperation makes the sudden out pores of rage and exhaustion seem almost believable.
Review of The Glass Wall
