The Shadow on the Window (1957)

When three young hoodlums rob a remote farmhouse, they end up killing the owner and having to take his secretary hostage. Luckily, her young son "Petey" (Jerry Mathers) escapes and turns up, shell-shocked, before his policeman father "Atlas" (Philip Carey) unable to speak! Now the thing is, the parents are estranged and the cop has no idea as to where his son has been, nor where his estranged wife "Linda" (Betty Garrett) actually is. We know that she is the hostage, and as the kids holding her get more and more paranoid, and liquored up, we can sense the increasing danger she is in all whilst the police try to track her down - completely ignorant of her predicament. Can they find her in time? At times it is quite a well paced little thriller with the pressures mounting menacingly at the house as the resolve of the young men starts to falter. Sadly, though, the quality of the acting lets this down quite badly. Carey is just going through the motions and though Garrett does try to exude a sense of fear as the trapped stenographer, serendipity just takes too an implausible an hand in the closing stages of this drama and it all rather (tragically) fizzles out.