Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Hugo Fregonese
Starring: Edward G. Robinson, Peter Graves, Jean Parker, Milburn Stone, Warren
Stevens, Jack Kelly, Russell Johnson
Hugo Fregonese's 1954 thriller Black Tuesday takes its name from the grisly American tradition of executing
death row inmates on Tuesday nights. The title might also evoke a
financial crash, or a day of retail sales. You might even say
commercialism and materialism have drawn its antagonist, mobster Vincent
Canelli (Edward G. Robinson), to this fateful Tuesday, along with
his young cellmate Peter Manning (Peter Graves), who murdered a
security guard while a robbing a bank.
Canelli and Manning are set to be fried in what a newspaper man
gleefully describes as a "double header." But Canelli has a plan set in
motion. His goons on the outside have kidnapped Ellen Norris (Sylvia Findley), whose father John (James Bell) is a guard at the prison.
Canelli offers John an ultimatum - aid his escape or he'll never see his
daughter again. John agrees, and with one of his lackeys taking the
place of a journalist the gang abducted, Canelli is sprung, along with
Manning and several other prisoners. Guards are slain and hostages are
taken. Canelli's plan is to convince Manning to reveal the whereabouts
of the $200,000 he hid away after his bank robbery, but Manning is all
too aware of the mobster's duplicitous nature and uses the existence of
the money to keep himself alive.
Black Tuesday is a curious blending of a 1930s gangster melodrama with the sort
of gritty crime thrillers that were gaining popularity in the 1950s.
Robinson's return to the sort of roles that made him famous two decades
earlier echoes that of James Cagney in White Heat, and his Canelli has a similar sense of fatalism as Cagney's Cody
Jarrett. As the trigger-happy gangster plugs anyone who even thinks
about getting in the way, we begin to wonder if his prison break is
really motivated by a sense of survival, if absconding with his moll (Jean Parker, another down on her luck '30s veteran) and a small fortune is his
true motivation. It seems more likely Canelli knows he can't escape
justice, but he wants to go out on his own terms and take as many others
down with him as possible.
This feeling that Canelli and possibly everyone around him are doomed
is heightened in the final act, when the police surround the abandoned
warehouse the gang and their hostages are holed up in. With the cop in
charge (Frank Ferguson) all but admitting that he's willing to
sacrifice the hostages to take out Canelli, things don't look good.
Canelli and his men stubbornly keep fighting. There's a great image of
dozens of empty cartridge shells on the floor around Manning's feet,
like cigarette butts smoked by an anxious expectant father in a
maternity hospital car park. The tension comes from the attempts to talk
sense into Canelli, but even the prison chaplain (Milburn Stone)
can't appeal to his conscience.
Despite featuring a loathsome antagonist who kills at the drop of a
hat, Sydney Boehm's script dares to criticise America's
sense of justice. The movie makes it clear that it disapproves of
capital punishment, with a newspaper editor sending a rookie reporter
(Jack Kelly) to cover the execution as he wants it to be reported
from the point of view of someone who will see Canelli and Manning as
human beings, and who might be sickened by what they witness. The film
adds a scene in which we observe the electric chair being tested by an
engineer prior to its use, and we see the disturbed expression on
a guard as he sets up chairs for the visiting public. In the final
act, the gun crazy cops pose as much threat to the hostages as
Canelli.
Fregonese's film falls short of the crime thriller genre's top tier due
to its frustrating lack of a clear protagonist for the audience to latch
onto. The many characters start to trip over each other by the end as
the film stubbornly refuses to single out anyone as Canelli's main
opposition. Perhaps the most squandered character is Ellen, who having
lost her father to Canelli's bullets is the one most deserving of
revenge, but she's reduced to a nursemaid for an injured male character.
The movie is almost single-mindedly interested in Canelli, and it's
credit to Robinson's immense screen presence that such a nihilistic
figure keeps us engaged.
Black Tuesday is on UK bluray
from November 18th.