1. This film ran today on the Movies! TV channel (a free channel) and this is why I like Movies! -- its willingness to unearth wonderful old stuff like this and air it free of charge. Too bad the network's commercials are so idiotic, frequent, and noisy.2. Someone here writes, "Why would Olivia de Havilland accept a role like this?" Well, because she was an actor. Actors want to act. Female actors in their 40s and 50s don't get offered many roles.3. James Caan is splendidly hammy. What a beautiful young man he was. But he was also amazingly stiff and armored in the shoulders and chest, and therein resided the source for many of his future problems with substance abuse (or so would opine Wilhelm Reich).4. Jeff Corey plays George Brady, the vagrant dude, nicknamed "Repent." (Does the "Repent" tattoo on his hand owe a debt to the tats on Robert Mitchum in "The Night of the Hunter"?) Corey was one of the great character actors of his generation (see also his work in "Butch Cassidy", etc. etc.). He was also a distinguished teacher of acting, maybe the best-respected such teacher in Hollywood in the '60s and '70s. Among his students: Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand, Robin Williams. 5. There's something about a nylon pulled over the face that's just flat-out scary on a primal level.6. Early in the film there's some pot-smoking going on in a car. This is by no means the first pot ever smoked in a movie but I'm wondering if it's maybe the first explicit, obvious case of pot smoking in a movie since the 1940s. There's an interesting list at Wikipedia called "List of Films Containing Frequent Marijuana Use" that supplies a bit of background - there was apparently a gap in pot use in movies between the '40s and the '60s. ("Lady in a Cage" doesn't qualify for the list because its pot scene is brief.) 7. The sequence at the end, where cars drive by and no one pays attention, seems to have been inspired by the Kitty Genovese murder case, which transpired in '64 and shocked the nation, and quickly interested Hollywood (Perry Mason had a Genovese-inspired case in '65). The Genovese incident was complicated and awful, half horror, half urban legend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kitty_Genovese8. This film plus "The Incident" (which came out a year later) = a good double feature at the drive-in. 9. Caan's demise in the film - splendidly weird! 10. My thumbs are up for this watchable, trashy, fun picture.

***SPOILERS***Olivia de Havilland is the incapacitated woman of the house Cornelia Hilyard who's babying of her 30 year old mamma's boy son Malcolm, William Swan, has driven him to just about to commit suicide just to get from under her apron strings. It's on a July 4th Holiday weekend that Malcolm plans to do himself in by taking a ride out in the country and blowing his brains out. It's then that Cornelia ends up stuck in her in-house elevator and menaced by the three teenage psychos who just escape from a youth reformatory looking for action and something to steal. With a blackout hitting the city and all electrical circuits out Cornelia can't get any help to free herself but at first does get a number of neighborhood visitors including the drunk religious nut George L. "Repent" Brady Jr., Jeff Corey. and his fellow drunkard and drinking partner over the hill hooker Sade, Ann Southern.The three escaped juvenile delinquents lead by the grinning hairy chested and burping Randall Simpson O'Connor, James Caan, who's made to look like a young and rebellious Marlon Brando-but comes across more like a young and slimmed down looking Donald Trump-plan to ransack the place and murder after brutally torturing Cornelia so there won't be any witnesses to their crimes. The two fellow nut cases that O'Connor has with him the spaced out,on drugs and alcohol, Elaine, Jennifer Binningsley, and what looks like a pot smoking and severely mentally retarded Essie, Rafael Compos, are of no help to him and screw him up and his "Master Plan" at every turn. It's not long that both Bradly Jr. is put away by a kill crazy Essie, under orders for his boss O'Connor, who stabs the pleading for his life drunk to death in order to shut him up and keep him from reciting the bible at every given opportunity. Sade in seeing the writing on the wall, in her being targeted to be murdered, escapes by locking herself into a closet and holding her breath not to be heard or noticed by the deranged trio.***SPOILERS*** It's when Cornelia finds out through a good-by cruel world letter left to her by her son Malcolm what his plans are she tries to make her escape by jumping out of the stuck elevator and breaking both her legs. O'Connor in then trying to murder the crawling to safety Cornelia ends up getting his eyes gouged out by what looked like two metal toothpicks she had hidden in her bra and ends up blindly walking or staggering into traffic and run over and crushed like road kill. Essie, who in fact can't drive, and Elaine end up getting caught by the police when the car Essie was driving lost control of slammed into a garbage dumpster. With her now rescued and out of danger Cornelia wants to find out if her son Malcolm didn't go through with his planned suicide. And hopefully if he didn't she'll do everything possible not to interfere with his life that was the very reason that been driving him to attempt to do it!

Spend 94 precious minutes watching a bunch of inane, base characters from the absolute extreme low spectrum of consciousness and humanity go through the motions. Olivia de Havilland must have needed the money to have lowered herself to this level. It's not clever like some of the other thrillers of the period with a distinct lack of imagination and creativity in scripting, and production values that I found lacking in subtlety. I found scant suspense and entertainment value here, just frustration at watching such an inane scenario that therein existed potential unrealised.I want my 94 mins back.

A long summer weekend is planned by Malcolm Hilyard. He is going away, leaving his convalescent mother, Cornelia, to fend for herself. Malcolm appears to be a troubled youth. We watch him write a note to his mother telling her he is about to commit suicide, to end it all. Cornelia, who is convalescing from a hip operation, does not see the note because everything conspires against her when the electricity goes out as a cable is disconnected by accident. Unfortunately for Mrs. Hilyard, she is trapped in the lift she has installed to make things easy for her. She will spend the length of the film in the elevator hanging about three stories above her living room.While Cornelia tries everything in her power to attract attention to get help, she only elicits the curiosity of George, a freak in search of something to steal. When he breaks into the house, he is surprised by the possibilities he finds. Earlier he had been at the pawn shop where the owner had no scruples dealing with hot stuff. George informs a floozy neighbor, Sade, about his good fortune, asking her to come along. Knowing about the situation with the lady of the house, they proceed to rob the place.A trio of misfits observe George and Sade carrying things from the house and they enter the place. Randall, the leader is a sadist. Elaine, who appears to be his girl and Essie, a Latino youth, cannot believe their luck. Randall proceeds to terrorize Cornelia, as well as George and Sade. These criminals have a confrontation with Mrs. Hilyard whose views on their station in life does not endear her to the criminals. The situation will end tragically.Directed by Walter Grauman, a man who made a name for himself working on television, the film feels exactly as though it was a dramatic presentation for that medium. Written by Luther Davis, the film is a curiosity we never saw. It has that 60s look typical of the era. Our main interest was to see James Caan's film debut doing a poor imitation of Marlon Brando down to the trademark tee shirt, emoting his way through the film. Olivia de Havilland goes through all the emotions of a trapped person that has to watch how her home is ransacked by vicious criminals. Ann Sothern, Jennifer Billingsley, Rafael Campos and Jeff Corey do what they can in an exploitation film that ultimately does not satisfy.