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The jumbled iron lines of the federal hospital's gate give way to the bareness of a cell in the withdrawal ward, a different arena for "the guy who couldn't lose." Wellman's Heroes for Sale informs the psychological construction, the addict is a welterweight champion (Cameron Mitchell) who must twice fight a war, twice win his wife (Dianne Foster). "Everything you do is a gamble," from boxing ring to Guadalcanal jungle, "then came hell." The battlefield is one of André De Toth's most harrowing sequences, a maelstrom of gunfire and mud brought to bear on the desperate Marine in a crater quickly filling with rainwater. Enter morphine, "the only thing that could drown out the guns and sing me to sleep," a white box in a cabinet in the screen's foreground so that he reaches for it in an image broken by glass slats. Compulsive craving is laid out as plainly and coldly as needed, its tremors grind down work and home alike. (The protagonist at an anguished nadir shoves his head into an alley garbage can, from the top of a building is a more geometric view of the abyss.) The pusher (Paul Richards) invades the suburban living room with baroque threats: "It'll be so hard for you to give yourself a shot with two broken flippers." Ray's shattered bathroom mirror (Bigger Than Life), the crawling palliative of a candy shop at night, persistent noir shivers in a success story. "You ain't got a monkey on our back. You're carrying a gorilla." The battered hope at the close is soon taken up by Edwards in Days of Wine and Roses. With Jack Albertson, Richard Benedict, Barry Kelley, Lisa Golm, and Kathy Garver. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |