[I wrote about half of this post last night, finished the rest after I'd actually slept and could make sure I hadn't just banged my face into the keyboard at four in the morning. No gills, dammit.]
I was radioactive for about six hours this afternoon. So far it doesn't seem to have given me superpowers, although I'm still holding out hope for functional gills in the morning. In any half-decent B-picture of the atomic age I'd at least have glowed in the dark.
Nobody glows in World for Ransom (1954), but I was still entertained to end the day watching a movie whose atomic MacGuffin is played by Arthur Shields. The title is the kind of gaudy inflation so beloved of the marketing department—it promises a wider sweep of story than Kidnapped Nuclear Physicist Sold to Soviets Unless British Government Ponies Up Five Million Pronto in exactly the same way, now that I think about it, that The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) makes better copy than Those Radioactive Sea Snails That Ate Some Dudes in the Salton Sea That One Time. The plot has a nice hook and a killer penultimate scene, but in between I think I can most charitably describe it as a first-rate el cheapo backlot adventure. Essentially reprising his role from the television series China Smith (1952–55), Dan Duryea stars as Mike Callahan né Corrigan, an Irish-American ex-G.I. turned "soldier of fortune and beachcomber" who "knows the China coast like the back of his hand," though he's most often found haunting a claustrophobic, chiaroscuro Singapore whose night-fogged streets and heavily layered camera angles almost succeed in diverting the audience from the same limitations of budget that render all roads in Malaysia with the same Californian stretch of ornamental palms, rhododendrons, and Spanish moss. His current assignment is more of a favor than a job. At the request of old flame Frennessey (Marian Carr), the one-time girl he left behind who pulled a Shanghai Lily during the war and now performs a racy nightclub act à la Amy Jolly, Mike is keeping an eye on her no-good husband Julian (Patric Knowles), a cashiered British officer and all-round weak character who turns out to have tangled himself up in the aforementioned kidnap scheme. Gumshoeing around after a man he considers a friend—on behalf of a woman he still carries a torch for—makes Mike feel like enough of a heel to warn Frennessey he's backing out, but when an accidental photograph in the street prematurely blows the plot to the authorities, he finds himself promising to get Julian out of national security trouble and home safe to his wife, all the while staying one step ahead of British police, Singaporean criminals, and the indeterminately international kidnappers themselves. Whether any of these three characters will get what they want in this disillusioned H-bomb world, of course, is a very open question.
I have already made this movie sound much more exciting than my experience of it. World for Ransom was Robert Aldrich's first solo directing effort and he's not even credited for it, an unofficial TV spinoff that feels very much like a half-hour of action padded out to a short feature's 81 minutes. Cheap sets are one thing, but it's hard to get away with a plot this simultaneously cluttered and aimless when the cast doesn't put the effort into suspending their own disbelief. As the plump, epicene criminal mastermind who toys with a chess set and delivers his nefarious ultimatum to the British governor with just a hint of unprofessional gloat on top of his businesslike terms, Gene Lockhart's Alexis Pederas looks like he knows that he should have been Sydney Greenstreet. Shields does what he can with the plot coupon of Dr. Sean O'Connor, who travels under an assumed name and laments that ten years ago he was a professor of quantum mechanics whom nobody cared about and now he can't even change flights without a visit from the secret service, but once kidnapped he disappears from the script to the point where I honestly suspect the actor filmed all his scenes on a day off from some other project's shooting schedule. Keye Luke is almost totally wasted as the photographer whose compromising snapshot of Julian impersonating an officer in a stolen embassy car—with the missing scientist in the seat beside him—gets him killed within three scenes of his introduction as one of Mike's few reliable friends in Singapore. Lou Nova does even less except glower and provide muscle and line readings. Duryea at least conducts himself like he's in a real movie—after a couple of goons administer him the least convincing beatdown in the history of stage combat, including a literal ass-kicking which doesn't get farther than a petulant tap of the toe, he carries himself through the next few scenes with as much grimacing, irritated care as though one of those pulled punches actually cracked a rib. His light, nasal voice with its natural slide toward sarcasm makes most of Mike's wisecracks sound better than they are, as when the racketeer whose bedroom he's busted into demands to know what he wants and a half-naked Mike, who has been impersonating a rickshaw puller in one of those disguises that only work in Hollywood Orientalism, cuts back, "Mostly a shirt." He has no real chemistry with Carr, but that's all right for a reason I'll get to in a minute.
The weird thing is that the film's undercurrents are fascinating. Costume, for example, and the patterning of characters against one another. Mike's characteristic attire is a tailored white seersucker suit with an equally light hat pushed carelessly back on his forehead; however improbably in a tropical climate, he can be identified by it in a crowd. Lest we make some automatic equation with the figure of the white knight, however, he's pointedly told in an early scene, "You shouldn't play Galahad. You're way out of character." He tries to behave like it anyway, for Frennessey's sake, not recognizing the self-serving roots of his chivalry. When he has to duck the police in order to follow Julian out of town, he borrows a dark shirt from a criminal and wears it through the ensuing two-fisted rescue of Dr. O'Connor, which has a tragic cost and for which he declines to take credit, leaving the unconscious scientist to be recovered by the British authorities with the cynical farewell, "I wouldn't be making a good hero, either." By his next to last scene, he's dressed to photonegative effect in a tightly buttoned white trenchcoat inside which the collar of a black shirt just shows. When he returns to the white suit for his last, epilogue-like appearance, we know now it's only clothing, signifying nothing about the morality of the man inside, only his romantic illusions. Julian, although generally undeveloped except through his pliability and opportunism, gets a similarly interesting moment of sartorial illumination. In order to meet the unsuspecting physicist at the airport, he has to pass himself off as one Major Ian Bone; he is provided with a false uniform of the correct rank, but quietly and scrupulously removes all the decorations to which he is not entitled, leaving rather more medals than his employer believed him capable of. As it turns out, they're still misdirection—he's impersonating his own former self as much as Major Bone, the long-lost image of an officer and a gentleman. The real Julian is a false friend to Mike, first denying the debt he owes the other man ("I believe he saved your life in Shanghai"–"I didn't ask him for it") and then following through with physical betrayal when, at the climax of the rescue action, he tries to cheat his way to hero status by shooting Mike and taking sole credit for saving the scientist himself. The real Major Bone (Reginald Denny) is precisely and appropriately the reverse: an initial antagonist whose by-the-book pursuit of a man he believes to be a mercenary traitor comes shrewdly around to such respect for Mike's scuffed, slippery honesty that he breaks rank to accompany him into the jungle to retrieve Dr. O'Connor, at the last a true friend who gives his life to save Mike's own as if redeeming his double's treachery. Almost none of this happens in subtle dialogue or well-choreographed action. The flat-roofed, adobe-sided buildings of the abandoned kampong in which Dr. O'Connor is imprisoned look for all the world as though they last doubled as a Mexican pueblo in a Western. You have to assume Imperial Stormtrooper levels of anti-marksmanship in order to believe that two white guys with a pistol each can take out a village of Asian gangster extras when they all have machine guns. I blinked a little at Mike's cheerful attribution of his familiarity with hand grenades to his father being in the IRA, to which Major Bone ripostes that his was with the Black and Tans. But there's this strange, submerged feeling of a much better, much tougher film shadowing the one Aldrich actually filmed, coming out mostly in stray lines and echoes and Joseph Biroc's cinematography, whose noir style in the city scenes makes the whole thing look more ambiguous than it really is.
I think it's this shadow film that breaks through in World for Ransom's best scene, the final confrontation between Mike and Frennessey. ( Love is a white bird, yet you cannot buy her. ) That's an ending that belongs to a thoughtful noir, not a haphazard action-adventure with a perceptible lack of world-ransoming. It's no good having the deep resonances in all the right places if the surface of the story is a quasi-boring mess.
I don't want to blame Aldrich for factors beyond his control, like the amounts of money and time he didn't have. The fact remains that the movie as it exists is much more interesting to think about than to watch. I saw it with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel; we missed the first five minutes and didn't regret any of the remaining hour and a quarter, but neither would I encourage anyone to seek it out under the impression that it's actually good. I always enjoy watching Dan Duryea. I'm glad Robert Aldrich went on to make some films I really love, like The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) and The Frisco Kid (1979). I adore World for Ransom's gloriously inaccurate original poster and would put it on my wall if I had the money to buy that sort of thing. The film itself, not so much. This pulp oddity brought to you by my worldly backers at Patreon.
I was radioactive for about six hours this afternoon. So far it doesn't seem to have given me superpowers, although I'm still holding out hope for functional gills in the morning. In any half-decent B-picture of the atomic age I'd at least have glowed in the dark.
Nobody glows in World for Ransom (1954), but I was still entertained to end the day watching a movie whose atomic MacGuffin is played by Arthur Shields. The title is the kind of gaudy inflation so beloved of the marketing department—it promises a wider sweep of story than Kidnapped Nuclear Physicist Sold to Soviets Unless British Government Ponies Up Five Million Pronto in exactly the same way, now that I think about it, that The Monster That Challenged the World (1957) makes better copy than Those Radioactive Sea Snails That Ate Some Dudes in the Salton Sea That One Time. The plot has a nice hook and a killer penultimate scene, but in between I think I can most charitably describe it as a first-rate el cheapo backlot adventure. Essentially reprising his role from the television series China Smith (1952–55), Dan Duryea stars as Mike Callahan né Corrigan, an Irish-American ex-G.I. turned "soldier of fortune and beachcomber" who "knows the China coast like the back of his hand," though he's most often found haunting a claustrophobic, chiaroscuro Singapore whose night-fogged streets and heavily layered camera angles almost succeed in diverting the audience from the same limitations of budget that render all roads in Malaysia with the same Californian stretch of ornamental palms, rhododendrons, and Spanish moss. His current assignment is more of a favor than a job. At the request of old flame Frennessey (Marian Carr), the one-time girl he left behind who pulled a Shanghai Lily during the war and now performs a racy nightclub act à la Amy Jolly, Mike is keeping an eye on her no-good husband Julian (Patric Knowles), a cashiered British officer and all-round weak character who turns out to have tangled himself up in the aforementioned kidnap scheme. Gumshoeing around after a man he considers a friend—on behalf of a woman he still carries a torch for—makes Mike feel like enough of a heel to warn Frennessey he's backing out, but when an accidental photograph in the street prematurely blows the plot to the authorities, he finds himself promising to get Julian out of national security trouble and home safe to his wife, all the while staying one step ahead of British police, Singaporean criminals, and the indeterminately international kidnappers themselves. Whether any of these three characters will get what they want in this disillusioned H-bomb world, of course, is a very open question.
I have already made this movie sound much more exciting than my experience of it. World for Ransom was Robert Aldrich's first solo directing effort and he's not even credited for it, an unofficial TV spinoff that feels very much like a half-hour of action padded out to a short feature's 81 minutes. Cheap sets are one thing, but it's hard to get away with a plot this simultaneously cluttered and aimless when the cast doesn't put the effort into suspending their own disbelief. As the plump, epicene criminal mastermind who toys with a chess set and delivers his nefarious ultimatum to the British governor with just a hint of unprofessional gloat on top of his businesslike terms, Gene Lockhart's Alexis Pederas looks like he knows that he should have been Sydney Greenstreet. Shields does what he can with the plot coupon of Dr. Sean O'Connor, who travels under an assumed name and laments that ten years ago he was a professor of quantum mechanics whom nobody cared about and now he can't even change flights without a visit from the secret service, but once kidnapped he disappears from the script to the point where I honestly suspect the actor filmed all his scenes on a day off from some other project's shooting schedule. Keye Luke is almost totally wasted as the photographer whose compromising snapshot of Julian impersonating an officer in a stolen embassy car—with the missing scientist in the seat beside him—gets him killed within three scenes of his introduction as one of Mike's few reliable friends in Singapore. Lou Nova does even less except glower and provide muscle and line readings. Duryea at least conducts himself like he's in a real movie—after a couple of goons administer him the least convincing beatdown in the history of stage combat, including a literal ass-kicking which doesn't get farther than a petulant tap of the toe, he carries himself through the next few scenes with as much grimacing, irritated care as though one of those pulled punches actually cracked a rib. His light, nasal voice with its natural slide toward sarcasm makes most of Mike's wisecracks sound better than they are, as when the racketeer whose bedroom he's busted into demands to know what he wants and a half-naked Mike, who has been impersonating a rickshaw puller in one of those disguises that only work in Hollywood Orientalism, cuts back, "Mostly a shirt." He has no real chemistry with Carr, but that's all right for a reason I'll get to in a minute.
The weird thing is that the film's undercurrents are fascinating. Costume, for example, and the patterning of characters against one another. Mike's characteristic attire is a tailored white seersucker suit with an equally light hat pushed carelessly back on his forehead; however improbably in a tropical climate, he can be identified by it in a crowd. Lest we make some automatic equation with the figure of the white knight, however, he's pointedly told in an early scene, "You shouldn't play Galahad. You're way out of character." He tries to behave like it anyway, for Frennessey's sake, not recognizing the self-serving roots of his chivalry. When he has to duck the police in order to follow Julian out of town, he borrows a dark shirt from a criminal and wears it through the ensuing two-fisted rescue of Dr. O'Connor, which has a tragic cost and for which he declines to take credit, leaving the unconscious scientist to be recovered by the British authorities with the cynical farewell, "I wouldn't be making a good hero, either." By his next to last scene, he's dressed to photonegative effect in a tightly buttoned white trenchcoat inside which the collar of a black shirt just shows. When he returns to the white suit for his last, epilogue-like appearance, we know now it's only clothing, signifying nothing about the morality of the man inside, only his romantic illusions. Julian, although generally undeveloped except through his pliability and opportunism, gets a similarly interesting moment of sartorial illumination. In order to meet the unsuspecting physicist at the airport, he has to pass himself off as one Major Ian Bone; he is provided with a false uniform of the correct rank, but quietly and scrupulously removes all the decorations to which he is not entitled, leaving rather more medals than his employer believed him capable of. As it turns out, they're still misdirection—he's impersonating his own former self as much as Major Bone, the long-lost image of an officer and a gentleman. The real Julian is a false friend to Mike, first denying the debt he owes the other man ("I believe he saved your life in Shanghai"–"I didn't ask him for it") and then following through with physical betrayal when, at the climax of the rescue action, he tries to cheat his way to hero status by shooting Mike and taking sole credit for saving the scientist himself. The real Major Bone (Reginald Denny) is precisely and appropriately the reverse: an initial antagonist whose by-the-book pursuit of a man he believes to be a mercenary traitor comes shrewdly around to such respect for Mike's scuffed, slippery honesty that he breaks rank to accompany him into the jungle to retrieve Dr. O'Connor, at the last a true friend who gives his life to save Mike's own as if redeeming his double's treachery. Almost none of this happens in subtle dialogue or well-choreographed action. The flat-roofed, adobe-sided buildings of the abandoned kampong in which Dr. O'Connor is imprisoned look for all the world as though they last doubled as a Mexican pueblo in a Western. You have to assume Imperial Stormtrooper levels of anti-marksmanship in order to believe that two white guys with a pistol each can take out a village of Asian gangster extras when they all have machine guns. I blinked a little at Mike's cheerful attribution of his familiarity with hand grenades to his father being in the IRA, to which Major Bone ripostes that his was with the Black and Tans. But there's this strange, submerged feeling of a much better, much tougher film shadowing the one Aldrich actually filmed, coming out mostly in stray lines and echoes and Joseph Biroc's cinematography, whose noir style in the city scenes makes the whole thing look more ambiguous than it really is.
I think it's this shadow film that breaks through in World for Ransom's best scene, the final confrontation between Mike and Frennessey. ( Love is a white bird, yet you cannot buy her. ) That's an ending that belongs to a thoughtful noir, not a haphazard action-adventure with a perceptible lack of world-ransoming. It's no good having the deep resonances in all the right places if the surface of the story is a quasi-boring mess.
I don't want to blame Aldrich for factors beyond his control, like the amounts of money and time he didn't have. The fact remains that the movie as it exists is much more interesting to think about than to watch. I saw it with
derspatchel; we missed the first five minutes and didn't regret any of the remaining hour and a quarter, but neither would I encourage anyone to seek it out under the impression that it's actually good. I always enjoy watching Dan Duryea. I'm glad Robert Aldrich went on to make some films I really love, like The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) and The Frisco Kid (1979). I adore World for Ransom's gloriously inaccurate original poster and would put it on my wall if I had the money to buy that sort of thing. The film itself, not so much. This pulp oddity brought to you by my worldly backers at Patreon.
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