Mjeteconer Just perfect...

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

hall895 A man climbs out onto the ledge outside his 15th-floor hotel room and threatens to jump. And then...nothing. As you can guess from the film's title this is not a situation that is going to be resolved quickly. This guy's going to be out on that ledge for quite a while. Knowing that we're a long way from any kind of a resolution drains much of the drama out of the film. There is the sense that the film is just biding time until it stretches itself out to proper feature length at which point something can actually happen. For much too much of this film's running time there is nothing going on. The initial shock of the man on the ledge dissipates quickly and then things become rather mundane and dull.Richard Basehart plays Robert Cosick, the man on the ledge, but it is Paul Douglas, playing the cop trying to talk him back inside, who is the real star of the film. Douglas brings some warmth and personality to the proceedings. His character, Charlie Dunnigan, is just an ordinary traffic cop who is able to reach Robert in a way all the supposedly smarter folks with all their psychobabble cannot. There's some good interplay between Dunnigan and Robert, performed wonderfully by Douglas and reasonably well by Basehart. Oddly though we end up sympathizing more with the cop than with the guy out on the ledge. We never really get to know Robert Cosick which definitely hurts the film. Eventually characters are brought in to try to explain who he is and what may have driven him to this point. But those characters don't help the film much. Agnes Moorehead plays Robert's mother who turns out to be an absolutely miserable, entirely unsympathetic character. The father shows up too and he's a total dud. By the time a character with some actual value to the story does show up it is too late to save a film which has become a bit of a snooze. The film may be only 90 minutes or so long but honestly it feels like 14 hours at times, it really drags. There's only so much you can do with a guy standing on a ledge for 14 hours. Some characters who have nothing to do with the situation are tossed in and they end up being nothing more than time-wasters. There's a group of cabbies betting on when Robert will jump. There's a young man trying to woo a pretty young woman he just met while they were both gawking at the spectacle. And, in her first film role, there's Grace Kelly playing a woman who rather bizarrely makes a life-altering decision based on the fact she sees some guy she doesn't know standing out on that ledge. The performances by Kelly and by Jeffrey Hunter and Debra Paget playing the young would-be couple are fine but their characters add nothing of value to the film. It's a film which begins with a shocking opening but which soon fizzles out. And after biding its time in rather boring fashion when the end comes it's not the big, dramatic finish you would hope for. The ending is very contrived and, like so much else about the film, very disappointing. Aside from a notably fine performance by Douglas there is not much to recommend you spending 90 minutes watching 14 Hours.

moonspinner55 Nervous young man visiting New York City stands on the ledge outside his fifteenth-floor hotel room window threatening to jump; the first cop on the scene, a "flat foot" working stiff, establishes a connection with the kid just before the whole incident boils over into a media circus. Despite a disclaimer at the beginning, this was indeed based upon a true story, and John Paxton's screenplay (expanded from an early draft by Joel Sayre) admirably wastes little time at setting the viewers' nerves on edge. Unfortunately, the budding confidence the cop initiates with the suicidal man isn't really developed--and, possibly in an editing mistake, he seems to know more about the guy's situation than he should be privy to. Paxton sets up several story threads within the large crowd gathering below on the street, but these relationships (particularly between the jaded cab drivers) are equally tepid. Strong central performances do bolster the melodrama, particularly by Paul Douglas as the good-hearted traffic officer (it's really Douglas' movie), Richard Basehart as the man on the ledge, and Howard da Silva as the police chief. Many famous, likable character actors pop up in support, as well as Grace Kelly in her film debut. Involving and intense, though sharper attention to detail and character might have turned the proceedings from good to great. **1/2 from ****

evanston_dad First things first: "Fourteen Hours" is NOT a film noir. I don't know why numerous resources about film noir (including IMDb) include it.It does have many of the characteristics of those police procedural docu-dramas from the late 40s and early 50s that so many noirs also shared, so maybe that accounts for it. This film, based on a true story, stars Richard Basehart as a man who threatens to jump from a city skyscraper. Paul Douglas is the cop who works overtime to prevent him from doing so. Over the course of the film, a whole bunch of psychobabble involving the man's childhood emerges to explain his actions, and late in the film, his one-time fiancée (played by Barbara Bel Geddes) shows up to shed even more light on the matter.This is serviceable if not overly remarkable film-making. It will probably engage your interest, but I doubt it will linger in your mind. I will forever remember this film as the one I was watching when my wife went into labor with our son.The movie received a rather random Academy Award nomination for its black and white art direction.Grade: B

Robert J. Maxwell This is, I think, what they called a "high concept" film. Let's have a young man climb out on the ledge of a New York hotel and build up a back story about his tsuris and at the same time tell small tales of the diverse witnesses to the guy's dilemma.That precisely how the movie moves along from point to point, a little mechanically, but suspenseful and engaging. It's professionally handled by Henry Hathaway, a director who probably had little sympathy for a temperamentally unstable fellow who couldn't handle his hysterical and self-indulgent Mamma, Agnes Moorehead.The goods are delivered. Most of the work is done by Richard Basehart as the would-be suicide and Paul Douglas as the traffic cop who befriends him and alternately wheedles and lambastes him.Movies mavens will be left agog after they see the list of supporting and bit players, many uncredited, who were to go on to climb to dazzling heights in Hollywood, either as stars or as indispensable supports -- Grace Kelly, Jeffrey Hunter, Jeff Corey, Brian Keith, Richard Beymer, and John Cassavetes among them.The movie doesn't wallow in easy sentiment. It's pretty tough-minded. But a modern treatment, if it had any pretense to realism, would be far more cynical. The only characters here who exploit Basehart's impending self destruction are a nutty preacher who naturally belongs to no recognized church, a cabbie who organizes a pool to bet on when Basehart jumps, and of course the press. But nobody in the streets complains that a weakling like Basehart, who is probably a sissy just out for attention, deserves to die. And if any of the bystanders jumps up and down yelling, "Jump! Jump!", it must have been while I was in a period of microsleep. In 1951, it's my impression, Americans in general weren't so anxious to see a sensational splash on Broadway, not even New Yorkers.Worth catching.