I have no idea what inspired Darryl F. Zanuck to put a stripped-down survival thriller rather than a more obviously eye-popping feature into production as the first and only flirtation of Twentieth Century-Fox with the mid-century craze for 3-D, but it makes me regret that I will never see Inferno (1953) with its vistas of desert air stereoscopically receding. It's formally experimental pulp, a kind of open-air chamber noir in Technicolor yet—slightly more populated than a one-man show, anchored in the grit of red sandstone and the blue haze of mountains and the gnarled green spikes of Joshua trees. It may not be the main attraction that Robert Ryan isn't once racist to anyone, but it doesn't hurt.
Warning, reads the rust-blotched sign at the dirt road's side, the sage-silvered Mojave stretching lone and level behind it. Do not attempt this route without ample supplies of water, gas – oil. We may therefore wonder what the tensely elegant woman and the drably methodical man are doing out here with their abandoned horse trailer and their strewn fifths of whiskey and their carefully spaced tracks; the answer is committing a crime. It isn't much of a crime, but then they aren't much of a couple—three nights into an affair begun on a mining survey, Gerry Carson (Rhonda Fleming) and Joe Duncan (William Lundigan) have taken impulsive advantage of a riding accident to ditch her husband in the middle of the desert with a broken leg, promising to return with help and intending no such thing. "It's not like killing him, exactly," she uncertainly justifies the false trail they have laid to mislead the search-and-rescue they will have to risk initiating in order to maintain an appropriate appearance of concern. "More just—not saving him." Her partner has fewer illusions, about the desert or themselves: "It's killing him, all right." If it weren't for the names in the credits, we might expect never to see this guaranteed dead man, only the effects of his murder on these uneasy lovers and their mutually curdling whim of bad romance, a study in guilt baking under the Southwestern sun. Luckily for the more than noir mechanics of this story, the hundred and ten in the shade of the title is just as much Gary Paulsen country as James M. Cain, however much it doesn't look it from the rustically adobe-toned lounge of a dude ranch or the tiles of a pool shimmering like a mirage in turquoise. From the stony scrub of the hillside where Donald Whitley Carson IIII (Ryan) is testing his marksmanship against his drinking and screaming to make the rimrock clap back, "Where are they?" it looks like a short sharp exhibition of buzzard bait.
"Just don't think about it, baby," Joe soothes a restive Gerry as they settle in for the drive back to Los Angeles, out of the dry, iron-stained rain shadow in which the sheriff was relieved to reassure her no signs of her errant husband had been found. "He didn't suffer any longer than he wanted to. He was bound to know it was hopeless pretty quick and he had the pistol." It so happens that the lovers have underestimated their victim, but within Hollywood limits, screenwriter Francis Cockrell and director Roy Ward Baker don't make it easy on him. In the parlance of seven decades in his future, Don Carson is a failson. A millionaire by inheritance, he's never done much with it besides play so inefficiently at being a tycoon that his secretaries refer to his desk as "the bottleneck," earning himself instead a reputation for bad temper, binge drinking, and pulling a vanishing act at such capriciously irresponsible intervals that it dawns like the first self-awareness of his life that he set himself up beautifully for his own murder. He's used to letting his credit rating take up space for him, griping about the helicopter he imagined his wife must have had trouble chartering him, "I told her to buy one if she couldn't." Wasting his ammunition out of boredom, fretfully slopping his water once he's run through his booze, he looks like Outward Bound's Least Likely to Succeed. Even the family lawyer who retains a regretful, exasperated affection for his difficult charge damns him with a one-percenter's epitaph: "If he hadn't grown up with so much money in a world where it has such power, he might have been quite a guy." The knowledge that he'll pull himself together sooner or later or we're facing a really short movie doesn't make it any less fun to watch Ryan who was six foot three with a stoker's shoulders and a face like one of the canyon's time-calved crags so easily convince us of his character's overgrown flimsiness that even his clumsiest moves toward self-preservation come as a cautious surprise. Carson proves his nerve when he sets his own leg with the improvised traction of a wedge of boulders and his resourcefulness when he splints it with tent pegs and strips of sleeping bag, but the inspiration to cannibalize the leather of his satchel for a pair of flat mitts to keep himself from scooching his hands bloody on the brick-dust scree is our first sign that this big hollow man might actually be smart: not a sufficient asset in itself, of course, to compensate for the hot equations of the desert, but it'll help a lot more than mere stubbornness or even spite. "Just because I never had to do anything like this doesn't mean I can't," the day-burnt millionaire encourages himself as he prepares to rappel down the broken cliff face with a rope that used to be a tent and a foot he can't put any weight on, after which he can look forward to working himself across miles of boulders and creosote well beyond the limits of his meager supplies. "I'll show them . . . I'll get out of here. And when I do, they'll be the sorriest pair that ever . . ." Neither his determination nor his ingenuity endears him to the audience so long as both are driven by revenge, especially since it manifests in mean-spirited fantasies of luring his unfaithful wife and her lover into the wilderness and stranding them even more cruelly than they did him. Instead and charmingly, we start to like him in his own right rather than as a matter of narrative protocol because his internal monologue is a hell of a lot less tough. I love it, actually, which I cannot say of most voiceovers in any genre. It's wry, interactive, self-undercutting, each macho move matched by a skeptical second thought. "It can't hurt forever," Carson stoically assures himself as he sets about fashioning his splint, then adds as if remembering that the jolt of the bonesetting laid him out cold, "Probably." Dry-mouthed, he experimentally pops a couple of pebbles to suck on, wonders with brief self-congratulation, "Did I read that somewhere?" and concludes, "Tastes like I made it up." His sense of humor emerges with his awareness of just how blued and tattooed he is when it comes to the most basic skills of wilderness survival, which he never bothered to learn even as he gallivanted around mountain trails and manganese claims. "Goodbye, lunch," he sighs as a dove flitters off through the rust-colored rocks, in no danger from his careful wild shot. A billfold in the desert is extra weight at best, but so is an ego.
Inferno is not some indomitable story of man overcoming nature; the desert is explicitly not to be overcome. "You got to go along with her—but you can count on her if you do." Carson has to acknowledge that he's more fragile than he's always boasted before he can learn that he's more capable than he's always feared and the process is full of neatly observed and not always predictable setbacks. The suspense of the canyon wall is not only whether his rag-braided rope will hold from ledge to ledge, but what he'll do if his improvised anchor doesn't come loose when he needs it for the next stage of his descent. By the time he's down to the last two bullets in his gun, every animal that hops or browses through his field of view is a complicated cost-benefit calculation, not neglecting such factors as limited mobility and coyotes. Viewers with more experience of the desert may feel like shouting as he despairs of dying of thirst in full view of a stand of barrel cactus. All of these sequences are staged economically, elementally, without a tug of melodrama except when Carson falls prey to it himself, sick with hunger and failure and not really consoling himself with a daydream of accusing his murderers from beyond the grave which loses its luster as soon as he has to think about the logistics of scavengers and cairns, but it is just this depression which blossoms into the exultant distraction of realizing that the sandy wash in which he's propped will be a pool in springtime, a rhapsody of imagined waterfalls and mist that draws the heartfelt reverie, "Must remember. Always visit desert in the spring." Even before it inspires him to excavate a makeshift well, once again attentive to the physical minutiae of muscles and angles and slowly roughening sand so that by the time he's got it walled with small stones, we understand it took more than a few scrapes to make an oasis, it marks the first time Carson has thought of the desert as a place of beauty as opposed to an arid obstacle course of protracted agonies and death. Certainly we find it more beautiful than the creature comforts in which Gerry and Joe immerse themselves like mannequins of the Southwestern style, their Fiesta-gold coffee cups and swimsuits of gilt and azurite and tall cool lemon fizzes intercut for maximum contrast with dust-bearded, sun-blistered Carson nursing his fires, hiking on his old mine-timber crutch; he isn't more authentic, though by now his dirt-browned clothes and sage-green bedroll blend him like camouflage whenever he leans against a Joshua tree, but he's stumbled into a peace their anxious machinations have left them no room for, canvassing the desert like vultures for a man whose death they mean to be sure of this time. As their never more than passing attraction bleeds out like oil from the guts of a Lincoln Capri, Carson muses to the first human person he's met in more than a week, "Funny. I probably wouldn't have even gotten out of there except for thinking what I was going to do to them. But now, somehow, they seem kind of unimportant." Ryan got so few chances in his movies to smile as beautifully and generously as he does in this kerosene-lit moment, not even at his own expense: "I do, too."
The climax oversteps; after widening naturally into a spiral of irony as unstressed as a Kesh's heyiya-if, the action doesn't escalate so much as it's kicked through the roof, just as if an executive—I wouldn't put it past Zanuck—had rung up at the last minute and ordered more fistfights, explosions, and objects flying toward the camera. It feels damn near cut in from some other film, an insult to the mordant, poetic editing of Robert Simpson. Fortunately, Inferno rights itself in its final scene with an encounter by the roadside where all its troubles began, ending without drama, merely the quiet recognition of change. Throughout it looks spectacular, photographed by Lucien Ballard with full advantage of natural light and the shadows of these red rocks and the bodies of its cast who can reveal just as much with the tightening grip of a glass or the lowering of a pair of a binoculars as with a limping, self-amused shrug. Flame-haired as if the title means her, Fleming contributes more than ornamentation as the dissatisfied wife with too much conscience for murder and not enough for mercy, a sort of failed throw at a femme fatale. I gather that Lundigan was almost chronically a straight arrow, but he's so effective as a crew-cut snake—sandy-lashed, his college boy's smile both wicked and weak—that I can't believe Follow Me Quietly (1949) wasted him as a cop. Larry Keating and Henry Hull turn in complementary support as the pensive lawyer and an old-time desert rat respectively, but it's Ryan's film and he carries it without ever looking like a job of capital-A acting whether he's angrily failing to potshot an empty or chewing on a torn rag of water like a fisher king healed. It's so nice to see him as the hero for a change and believable that he does not start out that way. I appreciate that as he gathers the little sun-blackened strips of jerky that used to be the deer he butchered with his pocketknife between scenes, he has been on his own officially long enough to try out the terrible joke, "Bartender, draw me a short deer." Every time he sets a hopeful signal fire, the modern viewer may scream at him not to burn down the Mojave. The rain arrives with the exact timing of the conservation of irony. Lastly, for audiences who like their desert movies to come with an intermission, Inferno obliges and it's nowhere near three hours long. You can pause it any time on the Internet Archive and run for the water fountain then. This spring brought to you by my first-class backers at Patreon.
Warning, reads the rust-blotched sign at the dirt road's side, the sage-silvered Mojave stretching lone and level behind it. Do not attempt this route without ample supplies of water, gas – oil. We may therefore wonder what the tensely elegant woman and the drably methodical man are doing out here with their abandoned horse trailer and their strewn fifths of whiskey and their carefully spaced tracks; the answer is committing a crime. It isn't much of a crime, but then they aren't much of a couple—three nights into an affair begun on a mining survey, Gerry Carson (Rhonda Fleming) and Joe Duncan (William Lundigan) have taken impulsive advantage of a riding accident to ditch her husband in the middle of the desert with a broken leg, promising to return with help and intending no such thing. "It's not like killing him, exactly," she uncertainly justifies the false trail they have laid to mislead the search-and-rescue they will have to risk initiating in order to maintain an appropriate appearance of concern. "More just—not saving him." Her partner has fewer illusions, about the desert or themselves: "It's killing him, all right." If it weren't for the names in the credits, we might expect never to see this guaranteed dead man, only the effects of his murder on these uneasy lovers and their mutually curdling whim of bad romance, a study in guilt baking under the Southwestern sun. Luckily for the more than noir mechanics of this story, the hundred and ten in the shade of the title is just as much Gary Paulsen country as James M. Cain, however much it doesn't look it from the rustically adobe-toned lounge of a dude ranch or the tiles of a pool shimmering like a mirage in turquoise. From the stony scrub of the hillside where Donald Whitley Carson IIII (Ryan) is testing his marksmanship against his drinking and screaming to make the rimrock clap back, "Where are they?" it looks like a short sharp exhibition of buzzard bait.
"Just don't think about it, baby," Joe soothes a restive Gerry as they settle in for the drive back to Los Angeles, out of the dry, iron-stained rain shadow in which the sheriff was relieved to reassure her no signs of her errant husband had been found. "He didn't suffer any longer than he wanted to. He was bound to know it was hopeless pretty quick and he had the pistol." It so happens that the lovers have underestimated their victim, but within Hollywood limits, screenwriter Francis Cockrell and director Roy Ward Baker don't make it easy on him. In the parlance of seven decades in his future, Don Carson is a failson. A millionaire by inheritance, he's never done much with it besides play so inefficiently at being a tycoon that his secretaries refer to his desk as "the bottleneck," earning himself instead a reputation for bad temper, binge drinking, and pulling a vanishing act at such capriciously irresponsible intervals that it dawns like the first self-awareness of his life that he set himself up beautifully for his own murder. He's used to letting his credit rating take up space for him, griping about the helicopter he imagined his wife must have had trouble chartering him, "I told her to buy one if she couldn't." Wasting his ammunition out of boredom, fretfully slopping his water once he's run through his booze, he looks like Outward Bound's Least Likely to Succeed. Even the family lawyer who retains a regretful, exasperated affection for his difficult charge damns him with a one-percenter's epitaph: "If he hadn't grown up with so much money in a world where it has such power, he might have been quite a guy." The knowledge that he'll pull himself together sooner or later or we're facing a really short movie doesn't make it any less fun to watch Ryan who was six foot three with a stoker's shoulders and a face like one of the canyon's time-calved crags so easily convince us of his character's overgrown flimsiness that even his clumsiest moves toward self-preservation come as a cautious surprise. Carson proves his nerve when he sets his own leg with the improvised traction of a wedge of boulders and his resourcefulness when he splints it with tent pegs and strips of sleeping bag, but the inspiration to cannibalize the leather of his satchel for a pair of flat mitts to keep himself from scooching his hands bloody on the brick-dust scree is our first sign that this big hollow man might actually be smart: not a sufficient asset in itself, of course, to compensate for the hot equations of the desert, but it'll help a lot more than mere stubbornness or even spite. "Just because I never had to do anything like this doesn't mean I can't," the day-burnt millionaire encourages himself as he prepares to rappel down the broken cliff face with a rope that used to be a tent and a foot he can't put any weight on, after which he can look forward to working himself across miles of boulders and creosote well beyond the limits of his meager supplies. "I'll show them . . . I'll get out of here. And when I do, they'll be the sorriest pair that ever . . ." Neither his determination nor his ingenuity endears him to the audience so long as both are driven by revenge, especially since it manifests in mean-spirited fantasies of luring his unfaithful wife and her lover into the wilderness and stranding them even more cruelly than they did him. Instead and charmingly, we start to like him in his own right rather than as a matter of narrative protocol because his internal monologue is a hell of a lot less tough. I love it, actually, which I cannot say of most voiceovers in any genre. It's wry, interactive, self-undercutting, each macho move matched by a skeptical second thought. "It can't hurt forever," Carson stoically assures himself as he sets about fashioning his splint, then adds as if remembering that the jolt of the bonesetting laid him out cold, "Probably." Dry-mouthed, he experimentally pops a couple of pebbles to suck on, wonders with brief self-congratulation, "Did I read that somewhere?" and concludes, "Tastes like I made it up." His sense of humor emerges with his awareness of just how blued and tattooed he is when it comes to the most basic skills of wilderness survival, which he never bothered to learn even as he gallivanted around mountain trails and manganese claims. "Goodbye, lunch," he sighs as a dove flitters off through the rust-colored rocks, in no danger from his careful wild shot. A billfold in the desert is extra weight at best, but so is an ego.
Inferno is not some indomitable story of man overcoming nature; the desert is explicitly not to be overcome. "You got to go along with her—but you can count on her if you do." Carson has to acknowledge that he's more fragile than he's always boasted before he can learn that he's more capable than he's always feared and the process is full of neatly observed and not always predictable setbacks. The suspense of the canyon wall is not only whether his rag-braided rope will hold from ledge to ledge, but what he'll do if his improvised anchor doesn't come loose when he needs it for the next stage of his descent. By the time he's down to the last two bullets in his gun, every animal that hops or browses through his field of view is a complicated cost-benefit calculation, not neglecting such factors as limited mobility and coyotes. Viewers with more experience of the desert may feel like shouting as he despairs of dying of thirst in full view of a stand of barrel cactus. All of these sequences are staged economically, elementally, without a tug of melodrama except when Carson falls prey to it himself, sick with hunger and failure and not really consoling himself with a daydream of accusing his murderers from beyond the grave which loses its luster as soon as he has to think about the logistics of scavengers and cairns, but it is just this depression which blossoms into the exultant distraction of realizing that the sandy wash in which he's propped will be a pool in springtime, a rhapsody of imagined waterfalls and mist that draws the heartfelt reverie, "Must remember. Always visit desert in the spring." Even before it inspires him to excavate a makeshift well, once again attentive to the physical minutiae of muscles and angles and slowly roughening sand so that by the time he's got it walled with small stones, we understand it took more than a few scrapes to make an oasis, it marks the first time Carson has thought of the desert as a place of beauty as opposed to an arid obstacle course of protracted agonies and death. Certainly we find it more beautiful than the creature comforts in which Gerry and Joe immerse themselves like mannequins of the Southwestern style, their Fiesta-gold coffee cups and swimsuits of gilt and azurite and tall cool lemon fizzes intercut for maximum contrast with dust-bearded, sun-blistered Carson nursing his fires, hiking on his old mine-timber crutch; he isn't more authentic, though by now his dirt-browned clothes and sage-green bedroll blend him like camouflage whenever he leans against a Joshua tree, but he's stumbled into a peace their anxious machinations have left them no room for, canvassing the desert like vultures for a man whose death they mean to be sure of this time. As their never more than passing attraction bleeds out like oil from the guts of a Lincoln Capri, Carson muses to the first human person he's met in more than a week, "Funny. I probably wouldn't have even gotten out of there except for thinking what I was going to do to them. But now, somehow, they seem kind of unimportant." Ryan got so few chances in his movies to smile as beautifully and generously as he does in this kerosene-lit moment, not even at his own expense: "I do, too."
The climax oversteps; after widening naturally into a spiral of irony as unstressed as a Kesh's heyiya-if, the action doesn't escalate so much as it's kicked through the roof, just as if an executive—I wouldn't put it past Zanuck—had rung up at the last minute and ordered more fistfights, explosions, and objects flying toward the camera. It feels damn near cut in from some other film, an insult to the mordant, poetic editing of Robert Simpson. Fortunately, Inferno rights itself in its final scene with an encounter by the roadside where all its troubles began, ending without drama, merely the quiet recognition of change. Throughout it looks spectacular, photographed by Lucien Ballard with full advantage of natural light and the shadows of these red rocks and the bodies of its cast who can reveal just as much with the tightening grip of a glass or the lowering of a pair of a binoculars as with a limping, self-amused shrug. Flame-haired as if the title means her, Fleming contributes more than ornamentation as the dissatisfied wife with too much conscience for murder and not enough for mercy, a sort of failed throw at a femme fatale. I gather that Lundigan was almost chronically a straight arrow, but he's so effective as a crew-cut snake—sandy-lashed, his college boy's smile both wicked and weak—that I can't believe Follow Me Quietly (1949) wasted him as a cop. Larry Keating and Henry Hull turn in complementary support as the pensive lawyer and an old-time desert rat respectively, but it's Ryan's film and he carries it without ever looking like a job of capital-A acting whether he's angrily failing to potshot an empty or chewing on a torn rag of water like a fisher king healed. It's so nice to see him as the hero for a change and believable that he does not start out that way. I appreciate that as he gathers the little sun-blackened strips of jerky that used to be the deer he butchered with his pocketknife between scenes, he has been on his own officially long enough to try out the terrible joke, "Bartender, draw me a short deer." Every time he sets a hopeful signal fire, the modern viewer may scream at him not to burn down the Mojave. The rain arrives with the exact timing of the conservation of irony. Lastly, for audiences who like their desert movies to come with an intermission, Inferno obliges and it's nowhere near three hours long. You can pause it any time on the Internet Archive and run for the water fountain then. This spring brought to you by my first-class backers at Patreon.
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