Precarious

Screencapping the architecture in The Night Holds Terror (1955). Any movie older than a decade is real-estate porn but the house-on-a-slope where the kidnappers hole up is doubly so, being light-filled and affordable. The balcony view of Los Angeles stretched out below in the night is echoed in so many noirs, from Get Shorty to Heat. The flickering city could represent the riches the criminals will never have or the information network that brings them down. The film's description of the technology police use to track the culprits makes it a compelling documentary. But Andrew L. Stone's noir is imbalanced. As producer, writer and director, he scores one out of three, and the story hews to real-life details fiction can't sell.