Time Without Pity is a crime thriller based on actor/playwright Emlyn William's stage hit, Someone Waiting. The film begins with the murder of a young woman at the hands of a wealthy industrialist (Leo McKern) and then puts the wrong man (Alec McCowen) on the execution stand. The father of the accused (Michael Redgrave) flies to London in an effort to save him, but as an alcoholic recently released from a Canadian hospital after an epic-drinking binge, his nerves are still shot and it doesn't help that everyone around him enjoys slogging the sauce and offering him glasses of the stuff. Whereas the play had the structure of a straightforward thriller that takes place after the execution and whose focus was on figuring out who the real murderer was, Losey and his producers significantly altered this in the film by revealing who the murderer is before the opening titles and leaving the audience with 24 hours before the execution, thus shifting the audiences attention from the "whodunit" angle to the more complex and swirling machinations behind the characters themselves. In part, this is a study on how different men react to the loss of power, the loss of a wife, the loss of virility and, ultimately, the loss of a son. Despite these grim scenarios, at the heart of Time Without Pity there is a hopeful and humanitarian message aided by the fact that Losey was staunchly against capital punishment under any circumstances. Adding to the suspense of fighting his son's impending execution is the constant fight Redgrave's character has against his alcoholic thirst - and, interestingly, Redgrave had real-life problems with alcohol but Losey credits him for never drinking while playing a drunk.
Pete Roleium and his Cousins is a stop-motion animation film featuring a collection of dancing and singing drops of oil meant to educate viewers on the many products that petroleum makes, like insecticide, suntain oil, nail polish, gum, and more. In Michel Ciment's Conversations with Losey book, the director says that it "was a half-hour film for the Petroleum World Fair Exhibition of 1939. That oil drop figure has remained a symbol of one of the oil companies - I think Shell - ever since... It starts on a bleak world, completely destroyed by war, and also destroyed by the removal of oil. The idea was to show that practically every product we live by these days has some element of oil in it. And the drops were so badly treated they vanished from the Earth. Then slowly they came up over the bleakness of the destroyed world singing a song `We are coming back if - you want us to come back!"
Home Vision Entertainment's dvd of Time Without Pity presents the film in its original 1.33:1 aspect ratio. The black-and-white cinematography by Academy Award® winning Freddie Francis (Glory, 1989) benefits from a new digital transfer and uses shadows to great expressive effect (with one of many highlights being a drunk subway ride that is both nightmarish and disorienting). Also tossed in are filmographies for Joseph Losey, Michael Redgrave, Leo McKern, and a liner notes essay by Wheeler Winston Dixon.
For more information about Time Without Pity, visit Home Vision Entertainment. To order Time Without Pity, go to TCM Shopping.
by Pablo Kjolseth
