The suicidal Cameron Mitchell has a lot to ponder as he creates a major disturbance on St. Patrick's Day in this edited version of what was then a fairly recent 20th Century Fox movie, "14 Hours". This truncated version is extremely well done, with intense performances and some very memorable character moments including an eccentric religious freak who keeps trying to get upstairs while chaos ensues around him. William Gargan is the heart and soul of this story, a traffic cop who runs into where angels fear to tread, and becomes Mitchell's sounding board as he contemplates whether to jump or continue facing life. The always excellent Sylvia Sidney gives a chilling performance as Mitchell's embittered mother whose husband (James Bell) abandoned them years before for booze, giving her the ammunition to try and destroy his memory in Mitchell's head, all the while fueling the fire with the young lady (Vera Miles) Mitchell loves so she can keep him under her thumb even though she resents him for Bell having left in the first place.
Manhattan is known for its chaotic lifestyle even on an uneventful day, so for a big parade to be interrupted by a personal tragedy can stir up both sympathy and hatred for the suicidal man who has taken away the focus on a pending parade. The 1951 movie this was based upon is still powerful, so for it to be edited by almost an hour for its TV version is rather risky. This intimate story takes the highest grades of meat from the full screenplay to make a gripping tale of one man's grasping of his own inadequacies, coming to terms with all of the things leading up to his desperate actions. Even the crowd gets in on the action, whether it being the overly cheery passerby Gargan keeps encountering (who claims to others around him that he happens to know Gargan's character) or the individual cops present (one who just happens to be Alan Hale Jr.) dealing with the type of crisis that NY cops still have to face every day.
Manhattan is known for its chaotic lifestyle even on an uneventful day, so for a big parade to be interrupted by a personal tragedy can stir up both sympathy and hatred for the suicidal man who has taken away the focus on a pending parade. The 1951 movie this was based upon is still powerful, so for it to be edited by almost an hour for its TV version is rather risky. This intimate story takes the highest grades of meat from the full screenplay to make a gripping tale of one man's grasping of his own inadequacies, coming to terms with all of the things leading up to his desperate actions. Even the crowd gets in on the action, whether it being the overly cheery passerby Gargan keeps encountering (who claims to others around him that he happens to know Gargan's character) or the individual cops present (one who just happens to be Alan Hale Jr.) dealing with the type of crisis that NY cops still have to face every day.
