This is little more than a programmer designed for the undemanding and very much a product of its time. Take the casting, for example, Fox knew they had a good thing in Widmark and seemed bent on keeping him working - this was his nineteenth movie in eight years - as long as he was solid marquee product. He was a much finer actor than that but this was the tail-end of the Studio System. As for the female lead, Darryl Zanuck was a noted swordsman with a penchant for putting his girlfriends in his productions (next up would be Juliette Greco) and who knows, in Polish born Bella Darvi he may have been thinking of a brunette version of Kim Novak though why anyone would want a brunette non-actress as well as a blonde non-actress is one for the Professors. The next factor is the period, this was the era of The Woman On Pier 13, I Was A Communist For The FBI and so on, the Reds under the bed syndrome. Here we have a gang of Reds bent on dropping an atomic bomb on Korea from a B29 thus leaving America with egg on its face. Not to worry, Widmark and his merry men SHOOT it out of the sky from a sub. Say no more.
Review of Hell and High Water
