‘Black Tuesday’ or — A Crescendo of Death?

It opens with a low angle shot of prisoners on death row awaiting execution as an inmate mournfully sings the blues. “I’ve got this movie pegged,” I thought to myself. “This is going to be one of those prison dramas where we get to know the various criminals behind bars as the clock ticks down to their inevitable fate. I think I can see where this is going.”

That’s not what happens in the slightest.

That’s because when two of the prisoners consist of a violent gangster, Vincent Canelli (Edward G. Robinson), and an inmate, Peter Manning (Peter Graves), who’s the only person who knows where the $200,000 he stole is stashed do you really think these two are going to stay locked behind bars for long?

You see, Canelli’s got a dame on the outside who’ll do anything for him so it’s not long before…

And that’s all I want to say because part of ‘Black Tuesday’s (1954) thrill is experiencing the film drag you by the scruff of the neck on one breathlessly violent ride with no idea where you’re going.

Sydney Boehm’s excellent screenplay is tight but Hugo Fregonese’s direction is even tighter as even when we’re outside the confines of the cells we still feel imprisoned, incarcerated, trapped. That’s because we are. Literally. It’s called ‘the human condition’ where the one thing we can’t escape is our own mortality: the inevitability of death is the condition; how we cope with it, or don’t, is what determines our humanity. As a guard observes about Canelli — “With only one day left to live he’d like to hurt everybody he can.” The question the film asks us is — Canelli’s certainly a psychopath, but would you necessarily act any more civilised in his situation?

Yet there’s another question being asked and it’s directed towards a society only too keen to dish out the death penalty on those it believes are deserving of it. Some citizens even look forward to these executions with glee, like attending a baseball game. So should we be surprised or shocked when those we’re about to slaughter fight back? There’s a murderous brutality on both sides going on here so just as the priest wants to figure out how a killer like Canelli might work on the inside, much like Canelli destroys a toy tank to investigate how it functions, a similar question must be asked about a nation only too willing to take the life of one of its own.

Stanley Cortez’ cinematography amplifies this sense of imminent annihilation to an astonishing degree with the entire screen filled with blacks so pitch-dark you feel they’re sucking the light from your eyeballs. Contrasts with any light source are extreme and sudden (at one point a van enters a courtyard visible as only a moving shadow, yet as soon as it turns by only a fraction of a degree its entire side blazes into startling visibility).

Further optical violence is added by the use of geometrically precise straight lines that don’t so much fracture the screen as slice it, creating paper-cut shadows and silhouettes sharp as razor blades. These lines are everywhere — vertical, horizontal, diagonal, completely ubiquitous — even on the back of a woman’s legs as she walks down the street.

‘Black Tuesday’ is gripping, fast-paced, beautifully constructed and deeply unnerving. Why? Because whether you’re guilty or innocent every day is potentially Black Tuesday. Yikes!