Wyler

I was surprised to find that William Wyler's film "The Desperate Hours" was not included in David Thomson's book "Have you Seen?" Evidently he doesn't rate it as highly as the others included, like "Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein". Again, I was equally surprised that the film was given a one star rating in "Helliwell's Film Guide". It's a good film. Maybe it suffers a little from it being an adaptation of a theatre play by Joseph Hayes and that he himself wrote the screeplay - theatre dramatists are not usually the best people to adapt work for the quite different style involved in film making, even if it is their own work; indeed this may create greater barriers to its success since the writer sees the action taking place on one set (usually in those days) and cannot visualise going outside that set. When this is done you can usually see that the action outside the "one set" is forced on the story - it is taken outside merely to show the audience that "this is a film not a play".
But William Wyler, the film's director, surely helped make it fairly presentable as a film. He had done it before in 1936 with "These Three", adapted from the play "The Children's Hour" by Lillian Hellman; she also did the adaptation to screen. He remade this film later in the 60's with a different cast, Audrey Hepburn and Shirley Maclaine. Neither of these two film are in Thomson's book and this one, like "The Desperate Hours", is only given one star in Halliwell's book.
I think Wyler is a better film director than either of these pundits claim; he made some fine films over a long career: "Dodsworth" from a novel by Sinclair Lewis is a fine study of an ageing business man; "Dead End" seemed good in its day and had a raw edge to it (another from a stage play - and it showed); "The Letter", a masterpiece (again from a play by Somerset Maugham); "The Westerner", a fine western with an oscar performance from Walter Brennan and an equally good performance from Gary Cooper; "The Best Years of your Life "; "The Heiress" with an almost frightening performance from Ralph Richardson; "Detective Story" with Kirk Douglas; "Roman Holiday", Audrey Hepburn's best film I think; "The Big Country". Those are some of them. "The Desperate Hours" ranks alongside them I believe with two outstanding performances from Humphrey Bogart and Frederick March.