Plot
Early one morning, a room service waiter at a New York City hotel is horrified to discover that the young man to whom he has just delivered breakfast (Richard Basehart) is standing on the narrow ledge outside his room on the fifteenth floor. Charlie Dunnigan (Paul Douglas), a policeman on traffic duty in the street below, tries to talk him off the ledge to no avail. He is ordered back to traffic patrol by police emergency services deputy chief Moksar (Howard Da Silva). But he is ordered to return when the man on the ledge will not speak to psychiatrists summoned to the scene.
Coached by a psychiatrist (Martin Gabel), Dunnigan tries to relate to the man on the ledge as one human to another.
The police identify the man as Robert Cosick and locate his mother (Agnes Moorehead), but her overwrought, hysterical behavior only upsets Cosick and seems to drive him toward jumping. His father (Robert Keith), who he despises, then arrives. The divorced father and mother clash over old family issues, and the conflict is played out in front of the police. Dunnigan seeks to reconcile Robert with his father, who Cosick has been brought up to hate by his mother. Dunnigan forces Mrs. Cosick to reveal the identity of a "Virginia" mentioned by Robert, and she turns out to be his estranged fiancee.
While this is happening, a crowd is gathering below. Cab drivers are wagering on when he will jump. A young stock room clerk named Danny (Jeffrey Hunter) is wooing a fellow office worker, Ruth (Debra Paget), whom he meets by chance on the street. A woman (Grace Kelly) is seen at a nearby law office, where she is about to sign the final papers for her divorce. Amid legal formalities, she watches the drama unfold. Moved by the tragic events, she decides to reconcile with her husband.
After a while, Dunnigan convinces Cosick everyone will leave the hotel room so that he can rest. As Cosick steps in, a crazy evangelist sneaks into the room and Cosick goes back to the ledge. This damages his trust in Dunnigan, as does an effort by police to drop down from the roof and grab him. As night falls, Virginia (Barbara Bel Geddes) is brought to the room, and she pleads with Robert to come off the ledge, to no avail. All the while, the police, under the command of Moksar, are working to grab Robert and put a net below him.
Dunnigan seems to make a connection with Cosick when he talks about the good things in life, and promises to take him fishing for "floppers" (flounder) on Sheepshead Bay. Cosick is about to come inside when a boy on the street accidentally turns on a spotlight that blinds Robert, and he falls from the ledge. But he manages to grab a net that the police had stealthily put below him, and he is hauled into the hotel. Dunnigan is greeted by his wife and son, and Danny and Ruth walk the street hand in hand.
Read more about this topic: Fourteen Hours
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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