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The aggressive and helpless sides of the masculine coin, Ida Lupino isolates them in a severe laboratory experiment. "This strange race against death," cf. Maté's D.O.A. and there's Edmond O'Brien again punished for playing hooky. The mechanic and the draftsman (Frank Lovejoy) gone fishing in the desert, too half-hearted to sneak into the strip joint near the border. The third passenger is the hitcher who's been cutting a murderous swath across nine states (William Talman), the shadow that takes human form with pistol in hand and Poe's "vulture eye." (Slaughter will be the outcome, he assures them, "just a question of when.") Windshields and seats and steering wheels become compositional elements in the confines of the sedan, a tension not just of hostages and desperado but of foregrounds and backgrounds. Rocky stretches outside figure expressively in a continuous play of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, a Walshian propulsion in the void. Cutaways give the rest of the world as busy figures in police offices, but mainly it's a concentrated beam on the pair of schlubs struggling not to crack before the maniac's reptilian gaze. "You guys worked up quite a sweat!" Between Detour and The Desperate Hours, the patient winnowing of plot and psychology for the pure noir fear within. A Lupino theme continued from Outrage, the subterranean violence that pricks the bubble of middle-class complacency, worked out under the blasting Mexican sun. The wedding ring on the gas pump, the squeaking radio and the bottomless well, sparse signposts for an abstracted memory of the war. "You ever been at the other end of a gun?" The end of the nightmare is the ocean following the wasteland. With José Torvay, Sam Hayes, Wendell Niles, and Jean Del Val. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |