Jules Dassin’s RIFIFI/’55, the classic French caper with the dialogue-free/real-time burglary, is all over the opening of this minor league crime pic as five masked men grab $10 mill in gold bullion off a train they’ve tricked into stopping. With cinematographer Ernest Haller laying on rain-soaked atmosphere, we can just barely piece together what’s going on in the extended opening action sequence as ill-gotten gains are loaded onto three separate trucks and driven away for a rendezvous in California. Director Hubert Cornfield makes good work of it, getting strong perfs out of little remembered second leads like Gene Raymond & Wayne Morris. The sticking point is Steven Ritch’s by-the-numbers story & script which settles for only the most obvious everyday errors to trip them up one-by-one/truck-by-truck and dies a quotidian death, not helped by an overblown score. Even a clever twist on getting all that gold across the border can’t get things back on track. Maybe the script just needed a relentless cop in pursuit, the missing element in its construction. As it stands, this starts to feel like a double episode of the old HIGHWAY PATROL tv series, but without a Broderick Crawford figure rattling off lines as he investigates and arrests.*
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: *Assuming RIFIFI’s been seen, why not give HIGHWAY PATROL/’55-‘59 a watch. Easy to find (and free) on various youtube platforms and holding up surprisingly well. All those old rural towns, roads, mom & pop cafes and small industrial factories now period document as PATROL a rare show of the period to shoot on rural locations. And while an occasional star-of-the-future shows up (Clint Eastwood, Leonard Nimoy), most of the actors have a pleasing non-professional feel about them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsbLnFBa-6Q&list=PL-aJSrEGIGy4Muhw4lhuYII5kDrBlUqrv
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