"The Glass Wall" is an intriguing and surprisingly timely film about undocumented immigration. With President Biden keeping in place Trump's policies limiting asylum applications, and U. S. Border Patrol agents literally lassoing refugees from Haiti, the plight of Peter Kaban (Vittorio Gassman) seems to have sprung from today's news. I saw this on the TCM "Noir Alley" feature and the hosts, Eddie Muller and Dana Delany, stressed that co-writer and co-producer Ivan Tors was himself an immigrant from Hungary and wrote some of his own experiences into the film. Though some of the incidents are contrived and smack too much of movie coincidence, the film overall is a gripping suspense tale. As a jazz fan, I also liked seeing Jack Teagarden (pushing the slide of his trombone farther out than usual; mostly he played "close to the vest" because he'd learned as a child before his arms were long enough to reach the farthest positions) as well as more modern players like Shorty Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre and Shelly Manne. About the one thing the film was missing is a strong leading man: Gassman would have been O. K. in a Fellini movie but he's just not a good enough actor for the lead. It's a pity this film was made two years after John Garfield's death (his last film, "He Ran All the Way" with Gassman's then-wife Shelley Winters, is very similar to this one even though he's a fleeing criminal instead of an immigrant) and a year before the advent of James Dean.
Review of The Glass Wall
