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Adumbrations of The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity and Out of the Past govern the work, a sense of déjà vu amplified in the titles by foreglimpses of the climax from different angles. The tale is recounted under surgical lights, the patient (John Payne) puffs on a cigarette as a slug is extracted, he's a former Los Angeles D.A. turned Las Vegas bouncer stranded in the Caribbean. The MacGuffin is a rare ruby lost in a plane crash, locating it is a proposition from "el hombre en la silla con ruedas" (Francis L. Sullivan). "I think I'd be allergic to prison food," asserts the weary protagonist until he learns that his former flame (Mary Murphy) is the wife of the jailed pilot (Paul Picerni). The witness is a habitué of the local cockfight arena, before any info can be exchanged his corpse is found next to the battling birds. More casualties follow to conceal the jewel's whereabouts (and to fulfill Chekhov's alligator pond), the gringo has his own punishment to absorb, in true Phil Karlson fashion. "I've been beaten, badgered, hit over the head and mixed up in three killings, and believe me, I'm going to find out why!" A shadowy penal colony just beyond the travelogue horizon, as befits a late-period noir in VistaVision Technicolor. (Jukeboxes are the nation's newest fad, Payne makes his way through a convention of salesmen booming with boogie-woogie.) The breakout scheme is indicative of the gagwork, a meticulous build-up yielding to a patsy who'd rather stay safely behind bars, marveling at the cleverness of the femme fatale. The coda sees an alternative to the limbo of The Lady from Shanghai, "it is a happy man who has the faculty to forget." With Eduardo Noriega, Arnold Moss, Walter Reed, Pepe Hern, Robert Cabal, and Sándor Szabó.
--- Fernando F. Croce |