Thanks to TCM, I’ve gotten the chance to discover a lot of old films that I, otherwise, would have probably never even heard about.  One of those films is A Cry In The Night, a low-budget, 1956 crime story that I randomly came across last month.

Harold Loftus (Raymond Burr) has issues.  He lives in a shack, he’s totally dominated by his overbearing mother, and he spend most of his time secretly peeping at couples who are parked at the local lover’s lane.  When he comes across Liz (Natalie Wood) and her boyfriend Owen (RIchard Anderson), he overpowers Owen and kidnaps Liz.  Now, Owen must work with Liz’s overprotective policeman father, Dan (Edmond O’Brien), to track down Harold and Liz.  Making things difficult is the fact that Dan blames Owen for the kidnapping and simply cannot bring himself to accept that his daughter was actually “one of those girls” who spent her Saturday night sitting in a car and sharing chaste kisses with her boyfriend.

(Seriously, the film made it sound like this was the worst possible thing that a girl could do with her time.  I’m not sure if Dan was supposed to come across like a reactionary or if this was just a case of the film having been made in 1956.  Personally, if that’s what the 50s were like, I’m glad I wasn’t born until the 80s.)

As directed by Frank Tuttle, A Cry In The Night tells its story in a stark, no-nonsense, semi-documentary manner.  (There’s even narration at the beginning and end of the film.)  O’Brien bellows his way through the role and Anderson’s colorless performance does little to make Owen seem like any less of a wimp.  However, Raymond Burr makes for a disturbingly plausible pervert and Natalie Wood is well-cast as Liz.  The film came out a year after Rebel Without A Cause and, watching her performance in A Cry In the Night, you can tell why Natalie Wood was Hollywood’s favorite vulnerable teenager.

I have to admit that I love films like A Cry In The Night, not so much because they’re great films (and, while always watchable, A Cry In The Night is certainly not a great film), but because they’re totally a product of their time.  As opposed to the big budget extravaganzas that were churned out by the Hollywood studio system during the 50s and 60s, low-budget B-movies like A Cry In The Night were designed to exploit contemporary headlines and contemporary concerns and, therefore, provide a lot of insight into what was going on with the American psyche at the time.

A Cry In The Night combines several themes that ran through the majority of the films of the period.  In the role of Harold, Raymond Burr is the epitome of the 1950s weirdo.  As opposed to the normal, all-American boys who make out with their girls in cars, Harold can only bring himself to lurk about and attempt to catch a peek of what normal society does on Saturday night.  When he kidnaps Liz, he’s not only threatening Natalie Wood, he is by extension attacking America itself.  Meanwhile, Liz’s boyfriend comes across like the type of intellectual liberal who probably cast two ballots for Adlai Stevenson while her father is definitely an Eisenhower man.   Boyfriend and father do not get along at first but what’s important is that they set aside their difference so that they can vanquish the other.  By the end of the film, the father is willing to invite the boyfriend to dinner and the boyfriend has learned that sometimes, you have to be willing to fight.

For those of you who keep crying about how the solution for all of America’s problems lie in bipartisan compromise, A Cry In The Night is the film for you!

For the rest of us, A Cry In The Night is an occasionally entertaining time capsule.