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Saturday, July 21, 2018

THE STEEL TRAP (1952)

Writer/director Andrew L. Stone, who favored blunt, fat-free iterations of various suspense genres, disturbs even-keeled bank exec Joseph Cotten with the mother-of-all MidLife crises in this inside-job bank robbery thriller. Smothering us with explanatory voice-over narration, Cotten fills in his own backstory of an ordinary life upturned by a sudden urge to lift a million bucks from the bank’s vault then dash to Brazil, a country without an extradition treaty, with loyal, unknowing wife Teresa Wright. In Stone’s script, only the robbery has been thought thru, the getaway not so much ill-planned as unplanned, ad-libbed on the run in a series of increasingly OTT nail-biting beat-the-clock races. Too many!; they start cancelling each other out before a sudden course reversal offers an ending too neat, too tidy & too unbelievable. So much so, it apparently dumbfounded the old Hollywood Production Code office into inaction. And how weird to see Wright & Cotten, a disturbingly close niece & uncle in SHADOW OF A DOUBT/’43, now a disturbingly close married couple. (They also brought along SHADOW’s composer, Dmitri Tiomkin, to try and rattle our nerves.)

DOUBLE-BILL: There’s usually something a little ‘off’ (in a good way) in Stone’s work, an effective handmade quality a bit outside the Hollywood norm. When it’s working, as in THE DECKS RAN RED/’58, it shows him at his best. OR: Watch Cotten play hardball suspense and hit one out of the park in his very next pic, Henry Hathaway’s deliriously TechniColored NIAGARA/’53, co-starring Marilyn Monroe and Jean Peters.

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