The plot for "Make Haste to Live" had promise...but ultimately the film made little sense and this annoyed me. It really could have been a good film.Crystal Benson was married to a violent mobster, Steve (Stephen McNally). He slapped the snot out of her and she was naturally afraid of him. Ultimately, she escaped and the law thought that he'd killed her and disposed of the body. So, even without a corpse, he was convicted and spent 18 years in prison. Now, he's out...and looking to exact his revenge on her...now that he's found her.While this sounds like a great plot, somehow the writing was not up to snuff. When Steve shows up in the small New Mexico town where she lives, she doesn't tell anyone who his is nor that he's threatening to kill her. Instead, inexplicably, he passes him off as her brother...and allows him to hang around her and her daughter....a young lady who doesn't know that her 'uncle' is actually her horrible father. Why doesn't Crystal tell EVERYONE he's out to kill her, he's a mobster AND why she ran?! This just doesn't make sense and the film became tedious...tedious because the solution to the problem seems simple yet the heroine seems inexplicably dim.

I'm a huge Dorothy McGuire fan and had was initially excited at discovering a film noir that I hadn't yet seen. About twenty minutes in I realized why I've never heard of this one. It's actually painful to watch. I really don't like any of the characters and have given up at 59 minutes. Just don't care what happens. For me, this is a first.

I expected "Sleeping with the Enemy" but this wasn't it. The tension wasn't there. I just wasn't afraid for the good guys or scared of the bad guy. I had hoped that the bottomless pit shown in the opening scene would play a bigger part, but it didn't - and it would have made a grand finale! But the ending was very disappointing!

The spooky opening sequence piques our appetite for Make Haste to Live. A sinister stranger looms in the bedroom where Dorothy McGuire tosses in restive sleep. The editor of a small-town newspaper in the New Mexico desert, she's being stalked by her husband, a gangster just released from the pen for murder -- HER murder. Seems that years before, in Chicago, a woman was killed in an rigged explosion; when the body was identified as hers, McGuire packed up and started a new life.But having set up this intriguing situation, Make Haste to Live loses its way and ends up a muddled mess. When the husband (Steven McNally) insinuates himself into the household of McGuire and their teenage daughter, he's passed off as a black-sheep brother. And credulity gets strained way past the snapping point. McGuire flip-flops between resourceful adversary and the most feckless of battered wives; at times the two roil with hatred for one another but at others a light flirtatiousness enters their interactions. Any valid psychology in this, however, isn't worked out in dramatic terms; we get no sense of the hold McNally has over his wife, only that he wants to kill her and she seems willing to die.A Bottomless Pit in an old Indian pueblo makes an early appearance but doesn't end up playing the role we come to expect it will; so the final resolution is contrived, coming not out of character but out of the blue. Moseying along from one thing to another, Make Haste to Live has no urgent destination in mind.