Fourteen Hours

Back in 1938, John Warde perched on a ledge 17 floors up a skyscraper, and, for 14 hours, threatened to jump. This vertiginous melodrama recounts the event in professional low-key journalistic fashion. As in Ace in the Hole, the emphasis is as much on the reaction of bystanders as on the plight of the would-be suicide. Cab-drivers take bets, while cops and psychiatrists try to talk him down. Grace Kelly, in her debut, appears among the onlookers.