Will DiGravio
Eleven films in five years. That is all it took for Grace Kelly to earn a place as one of the indisputable icons of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Of the fifty performers venerated by the American Film Institute as the silver screen’s greatest stars, only James Dean appeared in fewer.
Today, one is most likely to encounter Grace Kelly’s timeless star image in the context of the French Riviera, where she played opposite Cary Grant in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief (1955), a film without peer in glamour, and reigned as the actual princess consort of Monaco until her tragic death at fifty-two in 1982. But there is another place more crucial to Kelly’s on-screen legacy, and where it all began.
In 1950, Kelly, then freshly graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (which she attended at the same time as luminaries like Jason Robards, Anne Bancroft, and Don Rickles), and starting to make a name for herself on Broadway, was cast in her first feature film, Henry Hathaway’s Fourteen Hours (1951). According to Kelly’s biographer, Donald Spoto, Kelly was at the family home in Philadelphia when she received the film’s production schedule. Grace’s mother, Margaret, voiced great concern that her daughter would be on a film set in the streets of New York, or as she called it, “a city full of movie people.” It was, altogether, an unremarkable debut.
But just three years later, in 1954, she delivered two remarkable performances in the scrappy streets, dingy apartments, and unrelenting concrete walls of Manhattan: first, she conspired with an emotionally repressed photographer (Jimmy Stewart) to solve a murder in Rear Window. Then, she helped her aging, former-Broadway-star husband (Bing Crosby) find himself again, and at great personal sacrifice, in The Country Girl, a performance that would win her the Academy Award for Best Actress.
It seems that when Grace’s mother first saw the shooting schedule for Fourteen Hours, she rightly understood the centrality of the city streets to the production. Based on a true, 1949 story chronicled in The New Yorker, the film stars Richard Basehart as a young man named Robert, whose mental anguish has brought him to the brink of jumping from a Manhattan hotel’s 17th story. He perches himself on the building’s thin ledge, several feet away from a window where countless faces appear to try and convince him not to jump. The one man he trusts is a traffic cop named Charlie (Paul Douglas), whose knowledge of everyday people makes up for his lack of true medical or crisis training.
At the outset, Charlie begins to earn the man’s trust before his superiors send him back to the streets—ultimately, Robert requests the kind, round-faced Irishman return. It is in that brief interlude that the moviegoing public sees Grace Kelly for the first time. Through a rolled down car window, Kelly’s Louise Ann Fuller, an apparently wealthy woman, asks what is causing such heavy traffic—she’s about to get divorced, we later learn, and she needs to make an appointment with her attorney. Charlie advises that she get out of the car and walk, even lending her a hand as she gets on to the sidewalk. Even in this fleeting moment, one sees the seeds of what would come to define Kelly’s greatness on screen: an ability to maintain a regal air while offering a deep, relatable humanity. We sense her privilege and pain.
While today the film is likely best known only as Kelly’s debut, it features a who’s who of character actors from the period and is, in fact, a gem. It marks the debut of Jeffrey Hunter, who five years later would distinguish himself as Martin Pawley in The Searchers. He stands in the street watching the media circus that ensues around Robert, flirting with a young woman played by Debra Paget, also five years away from roles in The Ten Commandments and Love Me Tender, opposite Elvis.
Martin Gabel, best known as a regular panelist on the popular game show What’s My Line?, plays the chief physician on site, while Howard Da Silva, the Broadway star this critic loves best as Benjamin Franklin in 1776, plays the deputy police chief. And then there is Robert’s family: his ex-fiancé, Virgina, played by Barbara Bel Geddes (you may know her as Midge in Vertigo [1958]), his father, Paul (Robert Keith), and his mother, Christine, played by that tremendous force of the screen, Agnes Moorehead.
Each of these characters come to embody the quintessential chaos of New York City. The cold apathy of the police chief. The absent parents: the father who walked out in favor of the bar, and the mother who seems to think putting on a good face will wash all the problems away. The blue-collar guy from the streets who sees the situation for what it is. The young lovers enthralled by the chaos of the streets, projecting their hopes and fears onto it and each other. A group of cab drivers who shift from frustration to empathy. And the troubled man who simultaneously wants to slip away into the hum of the city, never to be seen again, and who enjoys being seen by all as he stands on the hotel’s ledge before the world and its television cameras.
Each of these characters give strong performances. The one who does not, through the fault of the script and not her own, is Kelly, the performer, ironically, who would go on to become the greatest star of all. Beyond the introduction, we see her in only two more scenes, both set in the offices of her attorney, where she and her ex-husband-to-be can see the struggle to save Robert. In a bit of melodramatic cringe, the sight of the trouble and the ordeal of the day inspires the unhappy couple to give their marriage one more chance. They embrace as Robert’s fate remains unknown. And that is it.
To watch the film today is to come for Kelly’s debut but stay for the remarkable ensemble that makes Fourteen Hours a thrilling tale. Yet perhaps there is more to Kelly’s performance than meets the eye. Perhaps in looking out the window at the man upon the ledge, she realized the centrality of harmless voyeurism to New York. And learned that sometimes, a look through the window can even save a life, or bring a man named Thorwald to justice.
