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The feint is on The Petrified Forest, the diner in the desert is but one part of a severe wartime abstraction. College dropout (Jean Parker) and "two-time loser" Pop (Emmett Lynn), introduced in an abrupt scene that sketches a complicated past and exemplifies the compressed tenor. The closest thing to a moon at night is the neon sign at the Dunes nightclub, run by the white-tuxedoed black-marketeer nicknamed "The Ghost" (Ricardo Cortez). Recounting a desperate backstory ("A rich country and a hungry kid. You figure it out") and boasting of the bullet in his brain, he threatens the girl's future with her lieutenant fiancé (William Marshall). The decisive line is drawn, out of Beckett's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui: "Hitler? Why, that cheap punk. He's an amateur. This is America!" Edgar G. Ulmer on Bugsy Siegel, obliquely, the empire built on sand goes up in smoke. The West is not quite new, gangs still wear cowboy hats. The rubber and extortion racket, the incriminating file in the cabinet that forces the old man to dig graves after a shootout. "My hobby. Collecting people I don't know." (The wielder of power flexes with a small gift for the heroine, the camera dollies in amid shadows so that the doll in the glass case fills the screen.) From elegance to madness, the criminal's "noise and bluff" brought out under the prairie sky, finished off on a greasy spoon's floor. "Mad dogs die of their own venom." The mirage at dawn is a sudden military parade, the hopeful close-up disintegrates into a reminder to buy war bonds. With Rose Anne Stevens, Ray Miller, Frank Hagney, Jack Ingram, and Barbara Slater. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |