To anyone thinking of viewing this film, I'd really have to recommend skipping to the last ten minutes, which are absolutely sensational. There you'll find Robert Taylor and Vincent Price engaging in a tense gun-fight to the backdrop of a vibrant street party in a Caribbean coastal town. Their gunplay isn't the only game of fireworks around as the screen dazzles with all kinds of crashes bangs and wallops going off around them as they take pops at one another.
What a pity to report then that to get to that point you have to sit through a rather turgid sub-"Key Largo" meets "The Lady From Shanghai"-type convoluted tale involving smuggling, blackmail, embezzlement, adultery and of course murder. The cast here is almost comparable to the A-listers who graced "Key Largo" comprising this time Robert Taylor, Charles Laughton, Ava Gardner and Vincent Price, but they almost all seem to actually be miscast. Taylor, despite wearing a soiled white suit throughout just can't carry off hard-bitten or world-weary, Gardner looks lovely but seems too young for her part as the conflicted and compromised wife, Price if anything plays his double-crossing bad guy part too blandly, while Laughton just looks uncomfortable throughout, perhaps it had something to do with his shoes after all.
The plotting is too dense, the inter-relationships among the leads lack credibility and the stakes just don't seem high enough to justify all the hoopla going on round about it. In short, the film tries too hard, indeed right from the first shot, it seems to want to throw every Noir cliche at the camera in the hope that some of it will stick as we see Taylor in a shadowy hotel bedroom, doing a voice-over flashback in front of a mirror to boot. It's all just overdone and yet underwhelming.
I remember I first became aware of this film when watching the Steve Martin noir-spoof "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid', which included as its own finale much of the pyrotechnic climax here. It really whetted my appetite to track down the parent movie and I was so pleased to actually have it found for me.
Then I made the mistake of watching it.
What a pity to report then that to get to that point you have to sit through a rather turgid sub-"Key Largo" meets "The Lady From Shanghai"-type convoluted tale involving smuggling, blackmail, embezzlement, adultery and of course murder. The cast here is almost comparable to the A-listers who graced "Key Largo" comprising this time Robert Taylor, Charles Laughton, Ava Gardner and Vincent Price, but they almost all seem to actually be miscast. Taylor, despite wearing a soiled white suit throughout just can't carry off hard-bitten or world-weary, Gardner looks lovely but seems too young for her part as the conflicted and compromised wife, Price if anything plays his double-crossing bad guy part too blandly, while Laughton just looks uncomfortable throughout, perhaps it had something to do with his shoes after all.
The plotting is too dense, the inter-relationships among the leads lack credibility and the stakes just don't seem high enough to justify all the hoopla going on round about it. In short, the film tries too hard, indeed right from the first shot, it seems to want to throw every Noir cliche at the camera in the hope that some of it will stick as we see Taylor in a shadowy hotel bedroom, doing a voice-over flashback in front of a mirror to boot. It's all just overdone and yet underwhelming.
I remember I first became aware of this film when watching the Steve Martin noir-spoof "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid', which included as its own finale much of the pyrotechnic climax here. It really whetted my appetite to track down the parent movie and I was so pleased to actually have it found for me.
Then I made the mistake of watching it.