In 1938 the disturbed 26-year-old John William Warde spent several hours on a 15th-floor ledge of the Gotham hotel in New York before throwing himself down into a Fifth Avenue packed with spectators. In 1948 Joel Sayre wrote a classic New Yorker piece about the incident, "The Man on the Ledge", which in fictionalised form became the 1951 Henry Hathaway film Fourteen Hours starring Richard Basehart as the jumper. Howard Hawks turned down an invitation to direct the film but came up with the notion of Cary Grant playing a philanderer hiding on a ledge from an irate husband and pretending he's a would-be suicide. Grant declined, but Yves Robert borrowed this idea for his comedy Pardon Mon Affaire (1976) starring Jean Rochefort, which Gene Wilder transposed to San Francisco as The Woman in Red (1984).
This all comes back to New York in Man on a Ledge, in which wrongly imprisoned cop Nick Cassidy...
This all comes back to New York in Man on a Ledge, in which wrongly imprisoned cop Nick Cassidy...
- 2/5/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
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