Black Tuesday

“They’re getting the throne ready, King.” This line alerts a Death Row prisoner that his time is up in Hugo Fregonese’s Black Tuesday, a prison break noir starring Edward G. Robinson as one of the wickedest villains of his filmography. Named after the day of the week when the prison conducts executions, the film centers on convicted murderer Vincent Canelli (Robinson) as he plans and executes a prison escape just moments before he’s seated in the electric chair; assisted by a prison guard whose family members he’s threatened to have killed, Canelli takes along fellow inmate Peter Manning (Peter Graves) because Manning has offered to share the $200,000 he’s hidden in a secret location on the outside. For maximum leverage, Canelli takes with him a posse of hostages, including a man of the body and a man of the soul: prison physician Dr. Hart (Vic Perrin), who’s forced to perform surgery on Manning (“If he doesn’t make it, neither do you”), and prison chaplain Father Slocum (Milburn Stone), whose treatment is far from holy (“Your collar ain’t gonna protect you”).  Hailing from Argentina, Fregonese provides the right balance of character development and action (the escape involves a bloody gunfight, a moving truck, and a kidnapped airplane pilot), the tension building up to an extremely bleak ending. What’s more, Black Tuesday contains extensive noir stylings, the shadow and light contrasting more sharply as the fugitives become more and more desperate.