Easily A Match For More Modern & Bloodier Variants.

screenman

I actually saw this movie at the cinema, hauled off by my father who was an avid gangster-junkie. That was way back when you got two movies in the programme. I'm not sure if this was the 'A' or the 'B' item, but its unmemorable companion was called 'The Gun-Runners'.

It was also my introduction to Eli Wallach. And I never forgot it.

The plot entailed heroin-smuggling, something most people didn't quite understand in those days. Wallach and his mentor were using innocent mules to take bags of the stuff ashore to avoid suspicion and capture by the customs. Then they had to get them back. But the best laid plans, etc etc.

Wallach's character is evidently pathological, and he plays it with a frightfully convincing panache. Don't ever get him angry...

His older sidekick is scarcely less bonkers, and whilst counselling restraint on the one hand, eagerly keeps a journal of every victim's last words.

People get killed in the drug business. An intermediary who they try to meet is so furious at his exposure that he slaps Wallach's face. He pays for it by being kicked through a balustrade onto an ice-rink 2 or 3 floors below.

In another extremely harrowing scene, they try to retrieve a bag of dope from the child of a young widow they befriended en-route. The bag is supposed to be hidden in her doll. Unfortunately, she has discovered it and used it all up, supposing it to be a toy face-powder. The rapid disintegration of their urbane bonhomie into a doll-shredding black fury as the child and her mother look on in tearful horror, is one of the most frightful scenes in movie drama. Tarentino couldn't better it. But it's all the more shocking for its appearance in the staid 1950's.

And there's plenty more where that came from.

This is one of the hardest-edged noir movies and its absence from DVD is incomprehensible. Believe me; if you haven't seen it and you're a fan of the genre, you've no idea what you're missing.

Don't go talking to strangers, now.

score 8/10

screenman 27 April 2008

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1864617/