Ransom

Director: Alex Segal

Overview

In this taut, convoluted drama, the son of a small-town couple is kidnapped and ransomed for $500,000. At first the father is willing to pay, but he changes his mind and instead broadcasts a televised offer of a reward for the kidnappers' capture if any harm befalls his son.

Product Details

Release Date:	07/29/2014
UPC:	0888574055523
Original Release:	1956
Presentation:	[Full Frame]
Sound:	[Dolby Digital Mono]
Language:	English
Time:	1:42:00
Sales rank:	23,897

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Glenn Ford	David G. Stannard
Donna Reed	Edith Stannard
Leslie Nielsen	Charlie Telfer
Juano Hernandez	Jesse Chapman
Robert Keith	Chief Jim Backett
Richard Gaines	Langly
Mabel Albertson	Mrs. Partridge
Alexander Scourby	Dr. Paul Y. Gorman
Ainslie Pryor	Al Stannard
Lori March	Elizabeth Stannard
Robert Burton	Sheriff Jake Kessing
Juanita Moore	Shirley Lorraine
Mary Alan Hokanson	Nurse
Robert Forrest	Fred Benson
Dick Rich	Sgt. Wenzel
Bobby Clark	Andy (the kidnapped son)

Technical Credits

Nicholas Nayfack

Producer

Editorial Reviews

Alex Segal's 1956 low-budget thriller Ransom! hides behind its two-dimensional kidnapping premise as a smokescreen. The film's roots run deeper than an abduction -- so much so that the kidnapping, in retrospect, appears a mere afterthought. Segal and his co-writers (Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum) build the gestalt of their story around David G. Stannard (Glenn Ford), a deeply flawed and errant father figure, who is not only morally impure (he pilfers lumber for his son's clubhouse, illicitly, at a knocked-down cost) but who runs his vacuum cleaner entrepreneurship second-in-command to the older brother to whom he has felt inferior since childhood. To overcompensate for his deep-seated feelings of inferiority, Stannard throws himself into an insane risk following his son's abduction (promising the abductors on television that they will never see a cent of the ransom, and swearing a Bible oath to use the cash as a ransom on their heads), which of course propels the man into a head-to-head battle of wills against his older brother, who thinks him insane. ("I'm sorry for you," the elder moans, ."..on so many levels.") In this sense, Stannard presages Nick Nolte's Sam Bowden in the 1991 Scorsese remake of Cape Fear by 35 years. To call Stannard "less than sympathetic" would be an understatement; he is seriously disturbed and even, arguably, ghastly. Segal's heart lies in the right place -- the psychodramatic prospect of Stannard wrestling with his own demons is far more fascinating than a Z-grade kidnapping plot -- but the child's murder would be a far more logical conclusion to the father's tumultuous inner struggle. (God, how it would have infuriated viewers had it stuck to its guns!) Ransom! suffers from its lack of dramatic momentum throughout; the preponderance of the film asks the audience to sit on folded hands and watch as Stannard cracks up and his wife, Edith (a shattering performance by Donna Reed) teeters on the edge of breakdown, which fails to generate adequate suspense. The flaw may lie, partially, in the producers' decision to lengthen the drama by appending footage onto it. (Segal originally shot an abbreviated version of Ransom! for network television). But the lengthened picture retains two powerful sequences: the weakened and bed-bound Edith's tender atmospheric recollections of the young Stannard's birth and the parents' onscreen discovery of the bizarre kidnapping attempt, which -- because it emerges beneath such an innocent masquerade (a phony nurse arriving at the school to pick the child up for medical tests) -- hauntingly echoes the latent depravity in 1950s Middle America (as evidenced by serial killers Glatman, Starkweather, Beck-Fernandez, etc.), with its eerie sociological parallels to morally schizophrenic Victorian England.