Beeil dich zu leben (1954)

Beeil dich zu leben: Directed by William A. Seiter. With Dorothy McGuire, Stephen McNally, Mary Murphy, Edgar Buchanan. After serving 18 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, a mobster is paroled and returns to a New Mexico town to exact his revenge on the woman responsible for his conviction.

“The spooky opening sequence piques our appetite for Make Haste to Live. A sinister stranger looms in the bedroom where Dorothy McGuire tosses in restive sleep. The editor of a small-town newspaper in the New Mexico desert, sheu0026#39;s being stalked by her husband, a gangster just released from the pen for murder — HER murder. Seems that years before, in Chicago, a woman was killed in an rigged explosion; when the body was identified as hers, McGuire packed up and started a new life.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eBut having set up this intriguing situation, Make Haste to Live loses its way and ends up a muddled mess. When the husband (Steven McNally) insinuates himself into the household of McGuire and their teenage daughter, heu0026#39;s passed off as a black-sheep brother. And credulity gets strained way past the snapping point. McGuire flip-flops between resourceful adversary and the most feckless of battered wives; at times the two roil with hatred for one another but at others a light flirtatiousness enters their interactions. Any valid psychology in this, however, isnu0026#39;t worked out in dramatic terms; we get no sense of the hold McNally has over his wife, only that he wants to kill her and she seems willing to die.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eA Bottomless Pit in an old Indian pueblo makes an early appearance but doesnu0026#39;t end up playing the role we come to expect it will; so the final resolution is contrived, coming not out of character but out of the blue. Moseying along from one thing to another, Make Haste to Live has no urgent destination in mind.”