A Life in the Balance

A serial killer (Lee Marvin) has Mexico City in a state of unease as he stabs his young female victims and leaves them with their arms folded. It's a bizarre part for Marvin and he does it perhaps like no one has ever seen him. He kidnaps the only witness to his last deed, an eleven year old boy, who is forced to accompany him over the course of a night in which one scene has them in church and Marvin is praying and asking God who he should kill next while the boy watches him and looks for a way to escape. The boy's father (Ricardo Montalban) is widowed and an unemployed musician, and the neighbors who live next door are angling to take the boy away from him due to his lack of money and instability. Montalban is OK in the film, but the emergence of Anne Bancroft as another out of work and broke character, whom he meets in a pawn shop run by the mean and greedy Dona Lucrecia, is quite interesting. As Marvin is on the run with the boy, night becomes morning, and the police dragnet is closing in. The film is a decent balance of the two strands, the fight over the boy and Marvin's psycho serial killer. The boy's character brings them (the two strands) together fairly well as the night unfolds and the police eventually close in.