Tonight's Movie: Plunder Road (1957) - A Kino Lorber Blu-ray Review

The Dark Side of Cinema Blu-ray sets from Kino Lorber keep bringing us lots of noirish crime goodness!

I have Volumes XXII and XXIII on hand for review, with XXIV due to arrive soon.

The XXII collection combines THE ENFORCER (1951) and THE SCARLET HOUR (1956), two films I've enjoyed at past Arthur Lyons Film Noir Festivals, with a new-to-me title, PLUNDER ROAD (1957).

PLUNDER ROAD plays like it was made just for me: It's a short 72-minute heist movie filmed at locations all over the Greater Los Angeles area, including Hollywood and Glendale.

The very interesting lead actors are a pair of now-grizzled lesser stars of the '30s, Gene Raymond and Wayne Morris. Morris, who took time out for World War II and was a highly decorated flying ace, matured into a really interesting character actor in the '50s, in films such as THE DESPERADO (1956).

In this Regal Films production released through 20th Century-Fox, Raymond and Morris play Eddie and "Commando," part of a five-member gang who pull off an audacious train robbery planned by Eddie. Eddie is described as being the leader with the brains because he has a college degree; it's his first heist.

The men successfully make off with gold bars headed toward a mint, then transfer it into three separate trucks as part of a plan to evade discovery.

As the trucks travel toward their Los Angeles rendezvous point, where the plan is to melt down the gold before hopping a ship at San Pedro, things...happen. I will save the details for viewers to discover, but there's some ingenious use of police radios and truck scales among the moments which move the story forward.

The opening heist scene on a rainy night is absolutely gripping, on a par with any other better-known robbery sequence, and the film maintains interest from there straight through to the final shot.

The screenplay by Steven Ritch, based on a story he wrote with Jack Charney, is perfect, keeping the story constantly in motion while letting out bits of character back story along the way.

I absolutely loved Raymond and Morris in these roles. Morris's character is a former stuntman who's a mixture of patient kindness and absolutely cold-blooded brutality. While I've enjoyed Morris in other '50s films, as mentioned above, I don't think I'd seen Raymond in anything of this era save for the MGM musical HIT THE DECK (1955).

Raymond, like Morris, left Hollywood to serve as a pilot in World War II, and he would later serve in Vietnam. He was long married to Jeanette MacDonald, from 1937 to 1965, and acted all the way up until 1976.

We don't know what has led Raymond's college man to commit his first crime in PLUNDER ROAD, but despite having a devoted, much younger girlfriend (Jeanne Cooper), his dour demeanor hints at a sad, frustrated life.

I particularly enjoyed a series of musicals and comedies Raymond made at RKO in the '30s such as WALKING ON AIR (1936) with Ann Sothern and LOVE ON A BET (1936) and CROSS-COUNTRY ROMANCE (1940) with Wendy Barrie. The fatalistic PLUNDER ROAD is the antithesis of those lighthearted movies.

The other gang members are played by Elisha Cook Jr., Stafford Repp, and Steven Ritch, who all sketch memorable characters in a limited time frame. Nora (also known as Naura) Hayden has a nice scene as a truck stop waitress.

PLUNDER ROAD was directed by Hubert Cornfield. It was filmed by Ernest Haller in black and white Regalscope. I loved everything about the movie's stark look, from that opening rainy night to the traffic jam on the Harbor Freeway in the final minutes. (And by the way, who knew that smog tickets were given out in 1950s Los Angeles?!)

The Blu-ray print is from an HD master from a 4K scan. There are some speckles here and there, including during the opening credits, and also a line down the middle of the screen for a period at one early point, but all in all this is a very good print with a clear soundtrack.

Extras consist of three trailers for other films available from Kino Lorber, plus a commentary track by Jeremy Arnold. Jeremy is an expert on minor films such as this one and definitely in my "Top 5" commentary track narrators, so I'm very much looking forward to listening to his comments soon.

I'll be reviewing THE ENFORCER (1951) and THE SCARLET HOUR (1956) here at a future date. As I've seen them before and know they're very good, I can highly recommend this collection.

Thanks to Kino Lorber for providing a review copy of this Blu-ray collection.

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