Customer Reviews

Make Haste to Live [VHS]

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Southwestern noir grows muddled, implausible

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, she'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.

But 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, he'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, isn'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.

A Bottomless Pit in an old Indian pueblo makes an early appearance but doesn'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.

Real good Noir Thriller.Stephen McNally is a excon getting out of prison after 20 years for the killing of his mistress who everyone thought was his wife,Dorothy McGuire.Steve tracks Dorothy and her and his daughter,Mary(The Wild One,The Desperate Hours)Murphy down in a small western town.Mary,needless to say,has no idea who Steve is,but Dorothy tells her hes her uncle.
Steve is out for revenge.Dorothy goes along fearing Steve will tell Mary the truth.
Long overdue on DVD.