Critics reviews

Ever since I watched her raw and vulnerable performance in Delmer Daves's A Summer Place (1959), I've been a huge fan of Dorothy McGuire. Here she is given the opportunity to take vulnerability to a dark and unhinged place and it results in a shockingly tense ending for a picture that starts out as a pretty basic mother and daughter trying to make a fresh start movie.

As it stands, the film is a B-movie twist on Gaslight, a study in how ready people were (and are) to believe a certain type of personable he-man over a woman. Chris doesn’t lose her mind, but as in the Cukor movie, Make Haste to Live shreds your nerves as the mobster checkmates his wife’s every attempt to free herself.