Famed M-G-M producer Arthur Freed, in a rare non-musical, gave writer Richard Brooks his first shot as writer/ director in this gimmicky South American political thriller. Mostly worth watching for Cary Grant’s intense reserve (all banked fires & imploding resentment*), it’s your typical neurosurgeon on South American holiday, operating on a dictator’s brain tumor in the midst of a burgeoning Peoples’ Revolution. Where’s my travel agent! A swaggering stylist, say Vincente Minnelli or Douglas Sirk, might just have brought this off, absurdities be damned, but Brooks was no stylist at the time (or later come to think of it), using all his energies to keep his plot in order. Nice support from Latin stalwarts like Ramon Novarro (as a military baddie) & Gilbert Roland (a Commie man-of-the-people type, not that his party is mentioned) helps make up for non-starter Paula Raymond in a failed star push as Grant’s endangered wife. Swedish Signe Hasso makes a nice stab as an Eva Perón type, but the guy having the most fun has to be composer Miklós Rózsa making like Heitor Villa-Lobos. Musically, that’s Brazil rather than Argentina, but still a lot closer to South America than the repurposed backlot sets Cedric Gibbons made Brooks shoot on. Those cobblestones! Brooks always knew how to structure a plot, but even when he lands the camera in the right spot, he can’t get a rhythm going; hitting a nadir in a couple of Eisenstein-inspired tries at Soviet-style montage. Surprisingly watchable even so, or is until its indigestible Have-Your-Cake-And-Eat-It-Too² ending.
DOUBLE-BILL: *Grant pulls off this tricky tone for another writer/director of limited style, Joseph Mankiewicz, in PEOPLE WILL TALK/’51. The trick probably lies in the way that film gives him a chance, missing here, for release at the climax. (Even more clearly revealed with Hitchcock in NOTORIOUS/’46.)
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