Best movie of this year hands down!

Simply A Masterpiece

As Good As It Gets

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

A reasonably good noir thriller is probably the best description that can be afforded SPLIT SECOND. An above average noir it was produced by Edmund Grainger in 1953 for the home of the great noirs RKO. Excitingly written by William Bowers and Irving Wallace it was crisply photographed in black & white by the great Nicholas Museraca and surprisingly directed in a good workmanlike fashion by Dick Powell. With no "A" list stars to speak of the picture is more than effectively played by a well chosen cast headed by Stephen McNally, Paul Kelly and Alexis Smith.Two escaped convicts (McNally & Kelly) hijack a car with two occupants (Alexis Smith & Robert Paige), waylay another carrying two more people (Jan Sterling & Keith Andes) and along with an old prospector (Arthur Hunnicutt) hold them all hostage in a ghost town in the Nevada desert. The town has been earmarked and cleared by the military for the testing of an Atomic bomb in a few hours time. This the captors learn from the radio and are confident of leaving on time. In the meantime Kelly is badly wounded from a gunshot he received in his prison escape bid and must have a doctor. McNally finds out that Smith's estranged husband (Richard Egan) is a physician and inveigles him by phone to come to the hideout or his wife will be killed. Things for the hostages don't go too well with poor attempts at escape and the savagely violent and somewhat psychotic McNally beating Andes to a pulp and shooting dead Smith's lover (Paige). Suddenly the radio announces that the bomb test time has been moved up and will now go off an hour earlier. It becomes a race against time now to get off the site. Leaving the hostages to their fate in the town a scurrying McNally, his fellow fugitive and a fearful Smith, who pleads to go with them, take off in the car but drive onto the actual bomb site itself instead of going in the opposite direction. The picture ends with the massive A bomb explosion, McNally and company perishing in the car and the hostages all surviving after taking refuge in a cave.The cast do an admirable job with a nicely written screenplay. McNally is particularly good applying himself assiduously to playing what he always played best that of the sneering, unscrupulous and mean spirited villain. Paul Kelly - who never gave a bad performance - is also good as McNally's softer hearted partner in crime. But something of a revelation is Alexis Smith! Smith an actress who for years was buried in inane glamour roles at Warner Brothers brings much to the table here in SPLIT SECOND. Her panic driven character, continuously on the verge of cracking up, is an incisive and inspired piece of acting. Who would have thought she had it in her? It is the best thing she ever did!With brilliant cinematography, good performances, an exciting screenplay all wrapped in a fine dramatic and atmospheric score by RKO's resident composer Roy Webb SPLIT SECOND comes across as a fairly rewarding visual experience.

Escaped convicts take a group of hostages into a ghost town in the Nevada desert that will be ground zero for a nuclear bomb test early the next morning. Stephen McNalley's ruthless criminal hits some unexpected high points during the long night, gunning one man down, and later tossing a Bible he was reading from on the floor, but perhaps the film's best part is that played by Alexis Smith as an unhappy wife who's abandoned her doctor husband. Even though the film is full of bad lines, director Dick Powell has still managed to make it interesting, and ultimately exciting, with an absolutely terrific ending as the anticipated nuclear experiment takes place with everyone running for their lives.

Dick Powell's directorial debut is a tense little thriller that will have you on the edge of your seat.Sam Hurley (Stephen McNally) is a prison escapee, who, along with a couple of his mates (including Paul Kelly as a wounded prisoner) manage to capture a few people and hold them hostage in an abandoned ghost town. Unfortunately the ghost town has been targeted as a nuclear testing site with an explosion due for 6 Am the following morning.Alexis Smith (she kept getting better with each movie) plays Kay Garven who is on her way to Reno with boyfriend in tow (Robert Paige from Deanna Durbin's film "Can't Help Singing"). She is going to divorce her husband (Richard Egan). They are accosted at a service station by McNally and his gang and are forced to drive to the ghost town. Unfortunately they run out of petrol. As Smith says "Did you think I was stopping at the gas station to buy perfume. I had been planning to buy petrol!!!".So they are forced to way-lay another car. Larry Fleming (Keith Andes) is a reporter going to Canon City to cover the prison breakout and Dotti (Jan Sterling) was stranded at the petrol station and was offered a lift.When they arrive at the ghost town the film turns into a tense psychological thriller as people's true characters are revealed. Alexis Smith is great as Kay Garven a completely self centred woman who will stop at nothing to save herself.Stephen McNally did play good guys but he was at his best playing pretty despicable characters ie., "Johnny Belinda". Jan Sterling plays Dotti, the obligatory tough girl with a heart of gold.They know that the explosion is due for 6 AM the following morning ...what they don't know is that it has been put forward an hour.Richard Egan plays Dr. Neal Garven, who makes a trip by plane and car to save the wounded escapee's life. That part is completely unbelievable - how would he have found his way out to that ghost town at 2 in the morning and how would he have got through the barricades??? The ending is exciting and laughable at the same time - completely in keeping with the times when nuclear fallout was not considered life threatening.

An atomic age "Petrified Forest", this film is intense enough to make you sweat bullets. The storyline basically follow that of "PF" in that a gang of killers hold an assorted group of people hostage but with the added twist that audiences in the 50's loved....the "A" bomb.Stephen McNally, a journeyman actor, does a serviceable job as the lead baddie, as does the veteran Paul Kelly ( a bad boy in real life). The statuesque Alexis Smith is wonderfully slutty as the cheating wife who gets her comeuppance when she joins McNally in their final desperate flight to escape the atomic test site in which they have mistakenly become trapped. Others in the group hide in a cave and survive....well, at least in this film. Since they emerge about an hour later into what we know would be a highly radioactive environment, their chances are pretty slim but this was the 50's and what did we know? Also on the scene were two forgettable "leading men" of the time, George Nader and Keith Andes and the always dependable Jan Sterling.Although misconceptions about the terrible after effects of atomic explosions abound in this film, put that aside and be enthralled by a taut thriller that could only have been made in the 1950s.