Black Tuesday
Directed by Hugo FregoneseVincent Canelli, a ruthless crime boss played by Edward G. Robinson, is hours from execution when he engineers a violent escape from the death house with the help of fellow condemned man Joey Stewart. Taking hostages – including a prison chaplain, Father Slocum, and a reporter named Frank Carson – Canelli forces his way into the outside world, using the captives as human shields while he searches for a cache of hidden money and a route out of the country.
The group of hostages splinters under the pressure of captivity. Peter Manning, a young man also caught up in the escape, harbors loyalties that are not entirely clear, while Hatti Combest, a woman with her own entanglements in Canelli's past, complicates the dynamic between captor and captive. Father Slocum works quietly at the edges, attempting to reach something human in Canelli, while the gangster's control over the group begins to fray as time runs short and the police tighten their cordon.
Black Tuesday belongs to the mid-decade cycle of American crime films that stripped the gangster picture down to its most functional elements – confinement, coercion, the countdown. Fregonese shoots it as a chamber piece under pressure, and Robinson, who had defined the genre at Warner Bros. two decades earlier, brings a weathered authority that gives the film a retrospective charge. The film does not romanticize its criminal or his fate, and that refusal is precisely its point.
