The Devil at 4 O'Clock (1961)
Directed by Mervyn LeRoy

Film Review

Whilst visually far less spectacular than the spate of big budget disaster movies that came in its wake The Devil at 4 O'Clock at least has the benefit of a well-structured and sustained narrative with convincingly drawn characters.  Mervyn LeRoy does a reasonable job of maintaining the pace of this unwieldy drama, assisted by an impressive cast headed by two cinema icons, Spencer Tracy and Frank Sinatra, and two great French actors, Jean-Pierre Aumont and Grégoire Aslan.   As ever, Tracy gives a committed performance as the whisky priest prone to eruptions of moral outrage, raising the bar for Sinatra who turns in one of his more respectable dramatic performances.  What the film needed to be totally satisfying was a considerably bigger budget, as would become de rigueur for subsequent disaster movies.  Whilst some of the special effects hold up remarkably well, others barely live up to the standard of a low budget television series of the time.  The switch between location set to studio mock-up also jars painfully, diffusing the tension in a number of key scenes.   The Devil at 4 O'Clock is a flawed production but, in spite of its many imperfections it stands up well when set against most of the disaster movies that it spawned, mainly because of the high calibre of the acting.

Film Synopsis

Three convicts, Harry, Charlie and Marcel, are en route for a prison in Tahiti when their helicopter makes an unscheduled stopover on the small South Sea island of Talua.  The landing is intended to allow another passenger, Father Perreau, to disembark so that he can replace the island's existing Catholic priest, father Doonan.  The latter makes use of the convicts' arrival, using them to undertake some building work on a hospital for children stricken with leprosy.  When the island's volcano begins to erupt the Governor orders the population to evacuate before the island is destroyed.  Realising that the children in the hospital are about to perish in the impending disaster, Father Doonan undertakes a perilous mission to try to rescue them...