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"Ever cry over spilt milk?" "Doesn't everybody?" The Arizona burg is a deep CinemaScope rectangle where illicit desires mingle, Richard Fleischer's complex technique allows for a complex formulation to be expressed simply. Copper terrain, the mining executive (Richard Egan) is locked in a miserable double act with the wife (Margaret Hayes), "the alcoholic and the tramp." The foreman (Victor Mature) is seen as a wimp by Junior, the nurse (Virginia Leith) is the object of obsession of the diffident bureaucrat (Tommy Noonan), the librarian (Sylvia Sidney) succumbs to theft in the face of debt. Enter a trio of criminals (Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin and J. Carrol Naish), disguised as salesmen to case the bank. "Nothing like looking spick and span for a stickup." Trucks and explosions work hard at leveling the landscape on the edge of town, the orange rockiness of primordial wilderness persists. Sharp vignettes in domestic parlors and hotel rooms and cocktail lounges, cavernous interiors for human criss-crosses closer to Minnelli's The Cobweb than to Kubrick's The Killing. The hood stomps on the hand of the kid who drops his Benzedrine inhaler, then keeps his accomplice up the night before the heist with a case of the heebie-jeebies. The troubled couple collapses on the staircase, weary flesh in a geometric welter of rails and curtains, an image subsequently scrubbed by Cassavetes in Faces. "Simple arithmetic. Failure breeds success, success breeds failure." Kleptomaniac and peeper cross paths at night, illuminated windows outside the nurse's flat typify the superb articulation of the widescreen. (Other notable horizontals include a train slicing through the prairie and a row of hostages bound and gagged.) The father gets another crack at the war in a barn, the coda is a reminder that the city is a desert with a thin asphalt layer. "It's so stupid and pointless to be alive in the morning and dead in the afternoon." Cinematography by Charles G. Clarke. With Ernest Borgnine, Dorothy Patrick, and Billy Chapin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |