...a consistently compelling effort that hardly wastes a minute of its appreciatively (and appropriately) brief running time.

Only as individual a director as Sturges could have concocted anything worth seeing out of Jeopardy.

Slick family vacation horror story.

Peligro! Jeopardy is directed by John Sturges and adapted to screenplay by Mel Dinelli from Maurice Zimm's radio play "A Question of Time". It stars Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan, Ralph Meeker and Lee Aaker. Music is by Dimitri Tiomkin and cinematography by Victor Milner. Running just shy of 70 minutes, Jeopardy is a classic lesson in how to garner great suspense from a small cast and set-up. Beginning with jaunty music and the scene setting of a family of three off for a vacation, it's all Americana bliss, but it's not long before fate deals the family some bad cards and we land firmly in thriller territory. The dialogue is safe and assured, with the stars turning in rich characterisations as written, particularly a wonderfully oily Meeker as the villain of the piece. Though very much plein air as a production, a claustrophobic and fraught air grips the play and drags the viewer in wholesale, a sense of cruel luck, danger and ironies hold things in a noir realm. While a turn of events in the narrative is deftly played, the sub-text shattering to the point we don't need to see it to feel it. Unfortunately some irritants stop it from hitting the top end of the scale. Daft ironies and highly improbable contrivances chip away at the pic's other strengths, one scene has the son (Aaker) trapped on a dilapidated pier, to which his dad calls out "stay right where you are", I mea…