When Richard Basehart (left) and Paul Douglas (right) reported for duty in June of 1950 to the New York location of Henry Hathaway’s FOURTEEN HOURS (1951), a lightly fictionalized account of the infamous and tragic John William Warde episode, both actors were thinking about the wives they had to leave behind.

Beyond that, the costars didn’t have all that much in common.  The older, Pennsylvania-born Douglas was a doctor’s son, a Yale graduate, a former semi-pro football player and sports announcer with the larger than life nickname “The Magnificent Mug.”  Younger by seven years (and looking younger still than his own 37 and change), Basehart was a born and bread Ohioan, the son of a newspaper editor who became a journalist and also worked in radio before trying his hand at acting.  Both performers had put in their time on the stages of The Great White Way but only Douglas had any real success there, as apoplectic steel magnate Harry Brock in Garson Kanin’s BORN YESTERDAY (1946-1949), opposite Judy Holliday (who hated him).  Both actors had just done well-crafted (and ultimately classic) films noir – Basehart as the angry loner in Alfred Werker’s HE WALKED BY NIGHT (1948) and Douglas as Richard Widmark’s partner in tracking down plague-ridden perp Jack Palance in Elia Kazan’s PANIC IN THE STREETS (1950).

Perhaps believing that good directing is mostly good casting, Henry Hathaway cast both actors in roles that reflected aspects of their personalities.  Although Douglas had already weathered four bad marriages and had a drinking problem, Hathaway saw in him a spark of life, a rage to live that suited the role of a New York traffic cop and devoted family man who becomes a lifeline to a tortured youth on the brink (quite literally) of suicide.  Nearly 40 and a decade older than John William Warde, Basehart nonetheless had that tortured look, that inner torment and desperation that sold the character’s crippling psychological damage.

Less than a month prior to filming FOURTEEN HOURS, Douglas had married his fifth wife, actress Jan Sterling.  Giddy with happiness, he would sneak away from the production on weekends, flying down to Mexico to where Sterling was filming a picture.  In an interview in Life magazine to promote the film, Douglas made a great show of testifying how his new marriage had cured him of his carousing and bad habits – and in fact the couple was still together at the time of Douglas’ death from heart attack in 1959.  In 1950, Richard Basehart celebrated ten years of marriage to his first wife, Stephanie Klein, but the anniversary would be their last.  Diagnosed with a brain tumor, the former costume designer underwent surgery at Cedars of Lebanon in Los Angeles but died on the operating table before Basehart’s work on FOURTEEN HOURS was finished on the Fox soundstage where filming had shifted earlier that month.

Part of what makes FOURTEEN HOURS so grimly compelling (apart from the you-are-there verite of its built-in tragedy) is watching these two fine actors play emotions very close to what they really must have been feeling: Douglas radiating hope and  certainty while arguing for the possibility of a second chance at life and Basehart clearly heartsick, defeated, and agonizing over the diminished appeal of survival.

FOURTEEN HOURS airs on Turner Classic Movies on March 1, 2009, at 9:30am (check your listings).  A DVD was released in 2006 under 20th Century Fox’s “Fox Film Noir” label and is currently available for rental from the online rent-by-mail outlets GreenCine and Netflix and can be purchased outright for less than $15 from Amazon.com, Borders.com and right here at Turner Classic Movies.