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Time Without Pity (DVD)
Year: 1957
Rating: PG
Director: Joseph Losey
Cast: Leo McKern, Michael Redgrave, Ann Todd
Release Date: April 13, 2011
Distributor: Shock
The Film: 2.0
FILMINK rates DVDs and Blu-rays out of 5“...begins as ludicrous and progressively gets more unconvincing.”
Fade in: a man chases a younger woman across her apartment. As he corners her onto her couch, the camera pans away to deflect the final blows. The camera returns to her face. She's dead, and the director reveals the man's face, a middle-aged vulgarian played by Leo McKern (Number Two in Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner, no less).
Courtesy of Joseph Losey (the American director responsible for the giant Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton flop that wasn't Cleopatra, Boom!), Time Without Pity is a conventional race-against-thriller that begins as ludicrous and progressively gets more unconvincing.
Michael Redgrave - so well cast in light comedy and thriller roles like in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes - gives a poor performance as David Graham, a moderately successful writer attempting to prove that his grown son Alec is innocent of the girl's murder. In particular, the British actor's crocodile tears in scenes with his son seem especially ill-conceived. The other actors - including Peter Cushing and Joan Plowright - don't respond much better.
Yet, the performers are given little with this rote material. Not only are the characters constantly playing catch-up to the audience, but McKern seems like such a blowhard that it is difficult to comprehend how the other characters can seem so oblivious to his guilt. As McKern's son notes, ‘People don't always act logically. Not everything is thought-out.' Review. In. Nutshell.
