Everyone has their favorite family vacation horror story but this one takes the prize. In Jeopardy (1953), Barry Sullivan and Barbara Stanwyck play a married couple traveling with their small son (Lee Aaker) along the Mexican coast. After scouting for an ideal location for their fishing trip, they set up camp near a deserted village. The little boy wastes no time exploring his surroundings and promptly gets stranded on a derelict pier. When his father attempts a rescue, he falls beneath the rotting timbers and is pinned in the sand. High tide is just a few hours away and so is certain death unless Stanwyck can find a rescue party for her husband. She races off in the family car to seek help and is apprehended by Ralph Meeker, an escaped convict who commandeers her vehicle with no interest in saving Stanwyck’s husband.
A taut, seventy-minute exercise in suspense, Jeopardy is a perfect example of why John Sturges was considered a master craftsman by Hollywood studio executives. Though modestly budgeted, Sturges elicited excellent performances from his three stars and transformed Jeopardy from a routine thriller into a surprise box-office hit for MGM. It was no easy task considering the original source material was a radio play, A Question of Time by Maurice Zimm. Screenwriter Mel Dinelli had to expand the material to three times its original length to make it a feature.
Jeopardy was Barbara Stanwyck’s first film after taking a year off from her screen career. Her original intention had been to retire after My Reputation (1952) but after spending some time in Europe, she said, “I simply didn’t know what to do with myself, so I went back to work.”
It was a lucky break for Sturges who later said, “I recall one aspect of her approach to her work that struck me as meaningful. I commented one day on how purposely and yet gracefully she moved, the marvelous sense of contained power in the way she walked, stood, sat down, or whatever. She told me years ago in New York she had the standard heel hitting clack-clack jolting walk of a chorus girl, which she was then. She went to the zoo, and for days and weeks studied the tigers, and made herself move as they did. That straight-on attack to become what she wanted to be seems to me a strong indicator of the kind of make-up she has as a person.”
Co-star Barry Sullivan was also grateful for Stanwyck’s participation, stating “of the films I did with Miss Stanwyck only Jeopardy sticks in my mind as having any merit, but all three occasions (the others were The Maverick Queen and Forty Guns) cling to my memory as fun experiences.”
Sturges had just completed the medical drama, The Girl in White (1952), when he accepted Jeopardy as his next film and he was insistent on filming it on location and not in the MGM studios like his last picture. Although the original story had taken place on the Baja peninsula which borders California and Mexico, Jeopardy was actually filmed at Dana Point, California (near Laguna Beach) with Yucca Valley substituting for the Baja region. The only exception was some close-up shots, which were filmed on a sound stage with a wave machine.
The unit production manager Dave Freeman recalled in the Glenn Lovell biography, Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges,” Shooting at Dana Point was a wild experience. We were in the water in swimming trunks and tennis shoes, planting these phony beams and rocks, and a tsunami occurs. This huge wave! It threw us all over the place. John looked up, and said, “Where did everybody go?”
The film was budgeted at $500,000 dollars but it was a superior B-movie for MGM, thanks to its cast and crew, which included music composer Dimitri Tiomkin (High Noon, Giant), cameraman Victor Milner (who had eight Oscar nominations for Best Cinematography at this point) and editor Newell P. Kimlin (Bad Day at Black Rock). Stanwyck and Sullivan were well established Hollywood actors at the time but Ralph Meeker was still in the early phase of his career and would soon move on to bigger roles in such iconic films as The Naked Spur (1953), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), in the lead as detective Mike Hammer, and Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957). Jeopardy was also a major role for ten-year-old child actor Lee Aaker, who was also memorable in the 1953 western Hondo with John Wayne (By the way, Aaker’s body double in Jeopardy was Billy Curtis, who played a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz and other roles requiring little persons).
Some of the promotional materials for Jeopardy made the film look like some tawdry melodrama with Stanwyck cast as a femme fatale type such as a poster with the tag lines, “She did it…because her fear was greater than her shame! She did it…and it was bad!” Regardless of the exploitation approach, the film received mostly favorable reviews with Variety called it “an unpretentious, tightly-drawn suspense melodrama” and noting, “The performances by the four-member cast are very good, being expertly fitted to the change of mood from the happy, carefree start to the danger of the accident and the menace of the criminal.”
John Sturges had already proven to MGM he was highly skilled at handling any kind of genre film as proven by his work on the police procedural Mystery Street (1950), the boxing drama Right Cross (1950) and the suspense thriller Kind Lady (1951). After making the western Escape from Fort Bravo (1953), Sturges finally graduated to A-pictures starting with Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), which was nominated for three Oscars including Best Director (the only nomination of his career). He would go on to make such audience favorites as Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957), The Magnificent Seven (1960), The Great Escape (1963) and Ice Station Zebra (1968).
Jeopardy has appeared in television airings over the years but fans of the movie should consider the Warner Archive Collection DVD disc from September 2018 which pairs Jeopardy on a double bill with To Please a Lady starring Barbara Stanwyck and Clark Gable.
*This is a revised and expanded version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.
Other Links of interest:
https://oprfmuseum.org/people/john-sturges
https://www.theyshootpictures.com/sturgesjohn.htm
https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2022/04/john-sturges.html
https://www.tcm.com/articles/214351/ralph-meeker-profile
Cinema Sojourns 