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.
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.