If you’re a sucker for the big top–and specifically if you’re a sucker for the cornball melodrama of The Greatest Show on Earth–you might be the audience for Ring of Fear, an obvious knock-off of Cecil B. DeMille’s Oscar-winner. Otherwise, it would take not just sawdust in the blood but sawdust in the head to enjoy this silly suspense movie. It’s set in the Clyde Beatty Circus, and the illustrious Mr. Beatty (a famed lion-tamer in his day) gets top billing–although his is by no means the central performance. A lunatic (Sean McClory, apparently wearing Charlton Heston’s jacket and hat from Greatest Show) escapes from prison in order to stalk a former flame, circus trapeze artist Marian Carr. In a bizarre plot twist, the famous writer of hard-boiled novels, Mickey Spillane, arrives at the circus to research a story and ends up investigating the strange acts of sabotage that are dogging the big top. (A truly wonderful flashback informs us that not only has McClory returned to the circus to win back the aerialist, he also wants revenge on Beatty, who once laughed at him for showing cowardice in the presence of a jungle cat.) Mickey Spillane plays himself, and although he can’t act much he gives a nice presentation of a 1950s hep cat. Supposedly Spillane worked on some of the dialogu; one hopes he wrote his own gotcha to the villain, “Your eyes… they belong to a homicidal maniac.” Lots of footage is devoted to Beatty snapping his whip at lions and tigers in his act, but other than that there’s surprisingly little circus action. The John Wayne-Robert Fellows company (later known as Batjac) produced this one, which is in good, early CinemaScope.
You never see the title character in William Wellman’s Track of the Cat–a black panther terrorizing the land and herd of a frontier family–which is just one of the many bold strokes of this ambitious movie. The intruder claims not merely cattle but also one family member, so middle son (and unqustioned alpha male) Robert Mitchum goes out in the dead of winter to bag the cat. Meanwhile, the tensions inside the ranch house are distilled from Greek tragedy with a large dollop of Freud: harridan mother Beulah Bondi (good performance) wants her sons to remain unmarried, despite the fact that youngest boy Tab Hunter has fallen for a forward lass played by Diana Lynn. Teresa Wright–almost unrecognizable as the spinster sister–speaks for sanity and modern thinking. Track is the second film Wellman made from a novel by Walter Van Tilburg Clark; the first was The Ox-Bow Incident, that equally serious and offbeat Western about lynch violence. For this one, Wellman admitted that one of his motivations was a long-held desire to make a color film that was essentially black-and-white; the snowy backdrops of the exteriors (shot spectacularly around Washington State’s Mount Rainier) offered that chance. It’s a very exactingly directed movie, both indoors and out, and qualifies as an experiment in mise-en-scene; but experiments in mise-en-scene have rarely translated into box-office success, and Track of the Cat was no exception. One problem: despite Mitchum’s robust presence, his solitary journey (which could be covered in interior monologu in a novel) is rather inscrutable. The spiky script is by A.I. Bezzerides, who would do Kiss Me, Deadly a year later. By the way, Wellman later regretted not showing the cat–but he was right the first time. It’s an eerie touch in a movie that gets under your skin.
Plunder of the Sun plays like a low-budget merging of two Bogart classics, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon. Wiseguy Al Colby (Glenn Ford) finds himself short of funds in Havana, but a mysterious antiquities trader (Francis L. Sullivan, doing his best Sydney Greenstreet) enlists Colby to transport a package from Cuba to Mexico. The package is a piece in a puzzle that could lead to millions in ancient gold, possibly buried in the elaborate ruins of Zapotecan temples–if Colby can survive the other adventurers jockeying to get the stuff. Director John Farrow keeps the story moving and the shadows at a satisfyingly noirish level even if the material never rises to anything like classic status, while Glenn Ford provides a fitting crul streak for his nobody-makes-a-sucker-out-of-me hero. This was one of two movies Farrow made in Mexico that year for John Wayne’s Batjac production company, the other being Hondo. The balled-up plot, international gaggle of eccentric performers (most colorfully Wayne regular Sean McClory), and somewhat chintzy location shooting call to mind another globe-trotting movie of that era, Orson Welles’ Mr. Arkadin, and this movie even shares actress Particia Medina with that picture.
A film noir set-up unfolds in the opening minutes of Man in the Vault: while relaxing one night at a bowling alley, a humble locksmith named Tommy Dancer (William Campbell) finds himself dragged into a bank heist plot because of his dexterity with lock-picking. It only takes 72 minutes for Tommy’s nightmare to unfold, and yet the storyline seems uncommonly convoluted; rival gangsters are involved, Tommy strikes a volatile match with a slumming Beverly Hills dame (Karen Sharpe), and a moll plays a seemingly extraneous role–not that there’s anything wrong with that, when the moll is the young Anita Ekberg. The ultra-cheap production valus deflate the effort to put some noir atmosphere into the thing, but the main problem is leading man Campbell, who was a cross between Vince Edwards and a young Tony Curtis, but without the attitude. (He had been in The High and the Mighty–like this film produced by John Wayne’s Batjac company–and went on to many TV roles.) Still, there are moments, and director Andrew V. McLaglen tries to work some ingenious visual touches into the mix. Berry Kroeger makes a truly decadent villain, while Batjac regular Pedro Gonzalez Gonzalez gives comic relief. The film comes very early in the credits of McLaglen and screenwriter Burt Kennedy, both of whom became associated with Westerns later in their long, fruitful careers. The movie keeps returning to the bowling alley (”Art Linkletter’s La Cienaga”) thereby setting up one of the strangest scenes of noir menace ever filmed. –Robert Horton
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The staggering cast includes Clyde Beatty, Mickey Spillane, Pat O’Brien, Sean McClory, Marian Carr. This cast just make The Batjac Suspense Collection the more awesome!
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