Fantastic!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Stanwyck gives it all she can give but it appeared to me that she wasn't exactly comfortable around the little boy who played her son.What a vacation is in store for her, husband Barry Sullivan, who gets trapped below a chunk of wood, and her young son.On her way to get help, Stanwyck encounters Ralph Meeker, a convict who broke from prison and is running. He immediately takes her hostage before she finally convinces him to come back with her to aid her drowning husband.The film tries to show that there is some good in anyone as Meeker desperately tries to free Sullivan and ultimately does, before he runs away from oncoming police cars. Stanwyck states that we'll ultimately read of his capture or demise as this 69 minute film ends. In reality, there is ultra-liberal hog wash shown here.

Awesomely improbable and foolish potboiler that at least has some redeeming, crisp location photography, but it's too unbelievable to generate much in the way of tension. I was kinda hoping that Stanwyck wouldn't make it back in time because, really, she was saddled with the wet, in more ways than one, husband,and she had an idiot child as well..why NOT run off with Meeker? But the nagging question remains..what sort of wood was that pier support made of if a rotten piece of it pulled off didn't float? Stanwyck, always impeccably professional, does the best she could with the material but it's threadbare.

"I like cheap perfume better; it doesn't last as long..." - Ralph Meeker's convict character (Lawson) tells this to Barbara Stanwyck's Helen character, after he gets a whiff of the perfume that she picked out w/her husband in Tijuana...! This line cracked me up, and also seemed like a metaphor for this film - that cheap is better than expensive, because a cheap perfume-loving man who has a way with a 2 x 4 is a better man to have around in the long run! I agree with some of the other comments posted about Helen's attraction to Lawson. Even though her narration states that she wants Lawson to be put away, she did seem attracted to his fiery nature, and that passion he stirred up in her wouldn't likely wash away with the tide!

Just a dumb old movie. First Stanwyck's son gets his foot trapped in a really dumb way, and then her husband gets his foot trapped in another really dumb way. In an effort to save him, Stanwyck gets unlucky, yet again, and comes across an escaped convict. She has a chance to kill him but fails in a very dumb way. In the end her husband is saved, and Stanwyck tells us through narration what the dumb message of the movie is. All's well than ends dumb.I could never figure out how an unattractive woman like Stanwyck ever made it as a leading lady in Hollywood's glamour-oriented Golden Era; that nose is so beautiful… So photogenic… The film is mercifully short, running a little over an hour. It's as though the director sensed that he was making crap, so he thought it best to keep the crap short.