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Morality of the chase, as Eastwood would say (A Perfect World), "a shame it has to be this way." The prisoner (Vittorio Gassman) is first a pair of anxious eyes in the darkness of his cell, then a crumpled torso sharing a cigarette with the police lieutenant (Barry Sullivan) following a scuffle. Devoted husbands on opposite sides of the law, one's got a cheeky hausfrau (Polly Bergen) in suburban Los Angeles and the other a humid vulturette (Mary Zavian) back in marshy Louisiana. The escape finds the convict sprinting out of a tunnel in the wake of a car accident and hopping on a trolley up Angels Flight Railway with agents in pursuit, Joseph H. Lewis has it all in a mobile long shot. "Desires and memories have a stronger hold on men than prison bars." Valjean and Javert in Cajun territory, a characteristically eccentric formulation, a striking meld of nature and artifice. A peculiar world for the lawman and his disgruntled partner (William Conrad), "camping in a graveyard" complete with a scraggly crone howling in the night. "We're practically brothers... Our father's name is Fear." Feverish after gulping swamp water, Sullivan sweats through a nightmare in which Gassman materiales as geysering shadows in a cavernous, fog-drenched corridor. (Shot with an ominously serpentine camera, it makes you wonder what a Lewis musical would look like.) A panning view of the riverbank follows the fugitive as he prowls past foliage and slips into the water, the deep-focus image holds until the pursuer drifts by in the background and his canoe is overturned. "Things can happen in that bayou," the road to redemption is paved with quicksand. Ray offers an exceptional recomposition in Wind Across the Everglades. With Robert Burton, Harry Shannon, Jonathan Cott, and Inez Palange. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |