An injured Vittorio Gassman crashes Robin Raymond’s “atomic” strip act in THE GLASS WALL—a social commentary picture marauding as film noir.
up with poverty-stricken, desper- ate Maggie (Gloria Grahame). She shows him some of the ropes of the Big City even as he brings survival skills honed by dodging Nazis and (though they’re never explicitly men- tioned) Communists to the business of staying in America. There’s a ticking clock angle in that, unless he’s apprehended by the next dawn, even the tes- timony of jazzman Tom (Jerry Paris) won’t keep Peter in the country. Already scarred (he’s had fingernails pulled), Peter keeps running despite his inju- ries, becoming at last a martyr as he rails at the empty UN as- sembly chamber (the title refers to the UN building, not an in- visible barrier around the US) about his situation. Slightly
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exaggerating things, Gassman’s haunted, hollow face takes up the full cover of a New York paper which constantly turns up to identify him as a fugitive. Tom sees the paper, but his girl- friend (Ann Robinson) won’t let him duck out on an audition with Jack Teagarden to rescue the man who saved his life, though he does eventually join Bailey in the race to save Peter. The terms (“asylum seekers” or “economic migrants” instead of “stateless” or “displaced per- sons”) and the ethnic groups in- volved have changed (the script makes Peter a goulash-loving “Hunky” and never specifies whether he’s Jewish), but the basic situation of THE GLASS WALL is still tragically credible. America is valorized as a land
of freedom from tyranny, but criticism of its callousness to- wards refugees creeps in. Gass- man, without making a meal of it, plays Peter’s puzzled disap- pointment at the neon chaos of Times Square (showing the low budget, too much footage is repeated). Maggie, a former shoelace factory worker who has a speech about employ- ment conditions that must have made HUAC tut about explicit criticism of capitalism, is down to poaching half-eaten dough- nuts and bringing her own tea- bag to a diner, then trying to steal a coat (from fat, shrill Kathleen Freeman) before be- ing chased into Central Park. She also has a bullying, hypo- critical landlady (Elizabeth Slifer) whose truck-driving son
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