A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Roadblock (Harold Daniels, 1951)

Charles McGraw and Joan Dixon in Roadblock

Cast: Charles McGraw, Joan Dixon, Lowell Gilmore, Louis Jean Heydt, Milburn Stone. Screenplay: Steve Fisher, George Bricker, Richard H. Landau, Daniel Mainwaring. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Robert Golden. Music: Paul Sawtell. 

You know that movie about the insurance man who commits a crime for a femme fatale? No, not Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). That one starred Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. This one stars Joan Dixon and Charles McGraw, and it's called Roadblock. It was directed by Harold Daniels, an actor who turned B-movie and later TV director. Double Indemnity is a classic and Roadblock is ... well, not too bad. McGraw plays Joe Peters, an insurance investigator who falls for an attractive woman he encounters in an airport. She's Diane Morley (Dixon), a sometime model headed for LA in hopes that she'll strike gold in some guy's wallet. He's exactly not what she's looking for, a guy who makes $350 a month, but they wind up together anyway. Eventually, he'll use his knowledge as an investigator to bring off a million-dollar mail car heist, all for love. It won't end well. McGraw is effective as a soft-hearted tough guy who falls hard for the woman he loves. Dixon's performance, however, is less successful. She starts out as a tough girl on the make and becomes mistress of a mobster (rather swishily played by Lowell Gilmore), but falls so hard in love with Joe that she's willing to live on his salary after all. I doubt that even Stanwyck could have brought off the role as written, and Dixon certainly can't. Still, the plot is nicely complex and it moves along so swiftly. There are worse ways to spend 73 minutes.

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