The Glass Wall

Opening with a touching montage of newly arrived immigrants escaping poverty and persecution, Maxwell Shane’s The Glass Wall extols the kindness and generosity of American citizens if not the American immigration system. Having spent ten years in Nazi concentration camps, Hungarian Peter Kaban (Vittorio Gassman in his first American production) has stowed away on a boat of European immigrants, but American authorities won’t let him disembark onto American soil unless he can prove he assisted the Allies during the war. His friend Tom (Jerry Paris), a clarinetist somewhere in Times Square, could vouch for him, so Peter escapes and tries desperately to track him down, visiting jazz clubs one after another and encountering desperate (but kind) souls willing to help him, including thief-and-likely-prostitute Maggie Summers (Gloria Grahame) and exotic dancer Tanya (Robin Raymond). Despite a few moments of moralizing, the film deftly combines action with humanity, suspense with hope, the new, sparkling United Nations headquarters building (the titular “glass wall”) rising up as a beacon of global peace and justice, his first sight of it a mystical reflection in a pool of water. (Construction of the UN building was completed less than a year before the film’s release.) It sounds trite, but the city of New York is developed as a character in the film, abounding with footage of cultural landmarks, blares of magnificent jazz, oppressive sidewalk crowds, skylines of limitless human progress.