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Hollywood Boulevard at dusk, lights come up and the burly fellow by the newspaper stand flinches instinctively, a true Jacques Tourneur protagonist. ("You can't imagine how many times I've stood here and watched it get dark," he muses. "I know how every shadow falls...") Okinawa vet, freelance artist, Aldo Ray of barrel chest and limestone croak. "A man with a problem," namely a bag of loot lost in Wyoming courtesy of a pair of bank robbers currently on his trail. (One is a doleful professional and the other a psychotic "adult delinquent," Brian Keith and Rudy Bond as an underworld duo closer to Siegel's The Killers than to Siodmak's.) His lifeline is the "case hardened" at the bar counter (Anne Bancroft), a pricey model nursing her own urban melancholia and ready to leave it all behind with the marked fugitive. Completing the equation is the insurance investigator (James Gregory) who grows fond of his target, drops a coin into a bus-station contraption and smiles at the koan it spits out: "Footsteps in the sands of time are not made by sitting down." Tourneur weaves all of this into a construction of rare elegance, distilling the David Goodis novel into a flow of rhymes and contrasts, the perfect companion piece to Out of the Past. The city on a humid summer night is at once bustling and vacant, on the outskirts are oil fields filled with machines that make handy torture devices. "Doomed relationships" and the surprising ones that form between hunter and hunted, a marvelous open-air fashion show reworked by Hitchcock in North by Northwest. The Greyhound ride to the treasure mountain notices a passenger patiently fiddling with his radio (he settles on "Red River Valley"), the snowy climax attests to the filmmaker's uncanny poetry, "familiar looks very different." (Losey's The Criminal is just over the rise.) Cinematography by Burnett Guffey. With Frank Albertson, Jocelyn Brando, and Gene Roth. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |