Jeopardy (1953)

Director John Sturges, who would later make such legendary suspense/adventure pieces as Bad Day at Black Rock, The Magnificent Seven, and The Great Escape, manages to get about everything you could out of this simple, modestly budgeted, and surprising unrushed race-against-the-clock film. Barbara Stanwyck, Barry Sullivan and Lee Aaker are an American family on vacation in Mexico's Baja peninsula, Barry gets pinned down by some heavy wood from a decaying pier on an isolated beach, and with high tide coming to swallow the poor fellow Stanwyck is forced to leave young Lee to tend her husband while she rushes to find help in a sparsely populated land were she doesn't even speak the language. A seeming bit of luck doesn't pan out when the lone American she encounters (Ralph Meeker) turns out to be an escaped fugitive wanted by Mexican authorities (the film never bothers to give us any backstory on how Meeker ended up jailed in Mexico and how he escaped). Meeker wants to keep Stanwyck as a hostage and use her car to hightail it to a not well thought out conception of safety. Barbara only has a mater of hours to convince her captor not only to return her to the beach where she came from, but to then help save her husbands life once there, which of course in the end is what happens, and predictably just in the nick of time of. Sadly forgettable, I recommend instead a far better film from the same year with a  surprisingly similar plot, (instead of an American woman held hostage by an American fugitive  in Baja Mexico while on vacation, its two American men held hostage by an American fugitive in Baja Mexico while on a hunting trip), the Ida Lupino directed suspense drama The Hitch-Hiker. Jeopardy gets only  **