Fourteen Hours (1951) on Netflix
Robert Cosick stands on a hotel ledge and refuses to come inside. Traffic cop Charlie Dunnigan talks to him through the window, trying to keep him from jumping.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb7.1/103,417 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes63%
Trailer
Plot summary
A waiter carrying room service to a fifteenth-floor hotel room finds a man out on the building's ledge. Charlie Dunnigan, a traffic officer, reaches the window and cannot talk him back in, and a superior sends him off the scene with contempt. The man will not speak with the psychiatrists who come for him; he asks for Dunnigan, who is brought back from the street. A psychiatrist tells the officer to relate to him on a human basis. Once the police learn his name is Robert Cosick, they go looking for his mother. Down below, a crowd collects to watch.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Fourteen Hours (1951)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
SPOILER
Fourteen Hours originally ended with Cosick falling to his death, as the real John Warde did. After Fox president Spyros Skouras's 23-year-old daughter died in a fall from the roof of the Fox West Coast Building in July 1950, Skouras refused the tragic ending and Henry Hathaway shot a new one that saves Cosick, delaying the film.- The film was based on the suicide of 26-year-old John William Warde, who jumped from the 17th floor of the Gotham Hotel in Manhattan on July 26, 1938, after 14 hours on a ledge, even though the onscreen credits called the story entirely fictional.
- Charlie Dunnigan was based on policeman Charles V. Glasco, who posed as a bellhop and spoke with Warde intermittently for 14 hours, convincing him to return to the hotel until a photographer scared Warde as he was re-entering.
- Richard Basehart's stunt double on the ledge was Richard Lacovara, and the padded platform below Lacovara was removed for some shots. Basehart himself endured more than 300 hours on the ledge with little movement, despite a sprained ankle and poison oak rashes on his legs.
- Howard Hawks refused to direct the film because of its subject matter; he was only interested in directing if the script could be turned into a Cary Grant comedy, but Twentieth Century-Fox declined.
- Grace Kelly made her film debut as Virginia, a part Anne Bancroft also auditioned for; Gary Cooper noticed Kelly during a visit to the set and later starred with her in High Noon.
