(1953)

Starring Gloria Grahame, Vittorio Gassman; dir: Maxwell Shane

This is a quite polemical film, from a left wing point of view. Gloria Grahame, tough-but-tender as always, is Maggie. She’s alienated from her dangerous, mind-numbing job as a process worker making shoelaces, where she’s also sexually harassed. She can’t get adequate, affordable health care and this leads to her unemployment.

Nor can the System respond humanely to Peter (Vittorio Gassman), a European refugee. The immigration official looks like Woodrow Wilson with a Hitler moustache, and seems about as compassionate: "You hear so many stories you don’t know what to believe", he says.

Despite, or because of, its agenda The Glass Wall is basically a quest thriller but its suspense is slackly handled.  In the bathroom scene where a newspaper headline threatens to give away our protagonist, thriller directors, let alone Hitchcock, would have routinely used montage editing to heighten tension - here it’s a static setup. More challenging filmmakers would have placed the moral quandary not with the musician who has to choose simply between a better gig and the debt he owes Peter for saving his life in the war, but with his ruthlessly ambitious wife who seeks to redeem her ‘second banana’ status by pushing hubbie into the limelight, literally.

There are some classy details. The flashbulb in the photo booth going off with the laughing hicks looking down on him underlines Peter’s vulnerability and the inherent unfairness of those whose citizenship is unearned. Inserts showing his descent into bohemia through overlaid neon signs of jazz haunts marked by three, then four, clarinets waving in rhythm mark time in a uniquely apposite manner worthy of a Don Siegel. (Of course there’s still only one black clarinettist in this!)

The extensive location shooting is fabulous – New York City is so overlit Times Square seems like Las Vegas. The UN building looked still under construction and the morning scenes just before the beautifully atmospheric dawn are among the best here – The Glass Wall ‘s cinematography by Joseph Biroc is strong throughout.

The ending of The Glass Wall is heart in mouth stuff, though the climactic peroration to an empty Human Rights Commission hearing room is cut from the same cloth as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator - and is about as ingenuous.

What’s most powerful about The Glass Wall is its prescience, fifty years later, of today’s shutdown, fearful world. It’s a resonance this fundamentally optimistic message thriller could not possibly have wished nor foreseen.