Zeitsperre (1965)

It is Friday evening, around 6:00 p.m., at the south branch of the Crown Canada Bank in Winnipeg, Canada. The employees are busy finishing their last tasks before the weekend. Colin Walker, who still has to make arrangements with branch manager Foster to close the bank vault, is picked up by his wife, Lucie, and their six-year-old son, Steve. As he sets the time lock on the burglar-resistant vault to 63 hours, his son Steve runs playfully through the branch’s teller area. Before Walker and his supervisor, Foster, can finally lock the steel chamber, they notice a car accident on the street outside the bank. While they hurry to the window to see what is happening in the street, Steve, unnoticed by the two men, tries out his new flashlight in the already darkened vault room. When Walker and Foster hurry back to the vault door shortly afterward, they lock the vault without taking another look inside. Immediately afterward, Steve’s parents realize he is missing. Evelyn Webb, a colleague, tells Colin that he must surely have let Steve out of the steel chamber. She says she saw him go in. Foster and Walker immediately try to open the steel door again, but the time lock has already been activated: the bank vault cannot be opened until 9:10 a.m. the following Monday. The parents continue desperately searching for their son, but he cannot be found anywhere in the bank building. Steve is trapped in the steel chamber. The police are alerted, and a desperate rescue operation begins under the direction of Inspector Andrews and Officer Brown. In addition to the psychological distress the boy suffers from being trapped, there are fears that the oxygen in the vault room will not last until Monday morning. Foster first tries to locate Peter Dawson, the designer of the bank vault, through the bank’s head office. He is the only person who knows exactly how the vault room and time lock are built. But that evening, Dawson has set off by car with his wife on a vacation trip. In the meantime, attempts to persuade Steve to release the lock from inside by speaking to him through a megaphone have failed. He cannot operate the mechanism properly. Welder Jarvis’s attempts to open the vault door with a blowtorch also fail. It is made of several metals that are both hard and heat-resistant, and it is too thick. Meanwhile, Dawson is sought through announcements on Radio Winnipeg. After hearing them on his car radio, he turns back from his trip and contacts the police. A newspaper editor offers to provide a helicopter to get Dawson back to Winnipeg quickly. The helicopter picks Dawson up and lands on the roof of the bank building. According to new calculations by doctors, Steve has very little time left to survive in the vault; there is only enough oxygen for a few more hours. With the help of volunteers, Dawson manages to break a hole in the wall at a particular spot beside the vault door. This allows him to reach into the vault room with one hand and release the lock from inside. Steve is rescued unconscious at the last minute.