Fourteen Hours

A young man named Robert Cosick stands on the ledge of a tall building, intending to jump. Convinced that his parents do not care about him and that he cannot make his girlfriend happy, he sees no reason to go on. A police officer, Charlie Dunnigan, reaches him and spends hours talking with him, trying to keep him from stepping off. Below, a crowd gathers in the street and waits, and the long standoff draws in relatives, bystanders and reporters alike.

Henry Hathaway directed the film for 20th Century Fox, working from a screenplay by John Paxton, with Sol C. Siegel as producer. It was the seventh of the eighteen features Hathaway directed in chronological order, coming between Rawhide and Niagara. Paul Douglas plays Dunnigan and Richard Basehart plays Robert, with Barbara Bel Geddes, Debra Paget, Agnes Moorehead and Robert Keith among the twenty-nine credited cast members.

The film runs ninety-two minutes and mixes drama with suspense. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.1 from roughly 3,400 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 7.3 from a much smaller group of 53 votes. The two audiences agree closely, and the larger IMDb sample indicates a solid, widely seen title that has held its standing over the decades.