Inferno

Inferno is a 1953 thriller starring Robert Ryan and directed Roy Ward Baker.  The film is an excellent example of a low-budget B movie crime picture that succeeds on all levels.  Hollywood once produced these kinds of films in great numbers -- TV hasn't quite figured-out the trick.  

Inferno starts with a kick.  We see a desolate landscape and a sign warning that people should not travel in this country without adequate water and gas -- notably, the sign has been shot to pieces.  The camera pans and we see an elaborately dressed movie star, a big armful of early 50's pulchritude (the villainess Geraldine played by Rhonda Fleming).  The woman looks horrified, angry, and menacing all at one time and this nasty, ambiguous expression is the subject of the film and its central enigma, a riddle the movie tries to solve during its modest 85 minute running time.  Geraldine is involved in a love affair with a stiff, Joseph Duncan -- he's a good-natured, murderous clod who thinks he's smart enough to manage the murder of his boss and girlfriend's husband, Carson.  Carson has been left to die with a broken leg on a sun-blasted cliff-top sixty miles away from where Geraldine and Duncan are planting fake evidence and intend to leave Carson's vehicle.  (We see Duncan walking backward on the sandy road to leave tracks facing in the wrong direction and seeding the site with whiskey bottles -- Carson, who is said to be an irascible brute, has been known to go on two or three day benders.)  While Geraldine and dull-witted Duncan drink champagne and enjoy elaborate meals in her home in Los Angeles, we see poor Carson tortured by his shattered leg and desperately marshaling all his power of hatred to survive in the terrible, arid heat of the desert.  Ryan, of course, is the best thing in the movie and his torments in the desert are both frightening and weirdly inspiring -- Carson admits that he's not much of a boy scout and doesn't know anything about wilderness survival but he's rational, courageous, and exceedingly patient and, of course, ultimately he escapes his solitary ordeal to wreak vengeance on his cheating wife and her lover.  (The film is similar in some respects to the excellent picture written by David Mamet and directed by Lee Tamahori, The Edge -- in that man-in-the-wilderness picture, an industrialist like Carson finds himself leading a small group of survivors through lethal Alaskan mountains; Anthony Hopkins, who plays the hero in The Edge, says that most people who are lost in the wilderness panic and "die of embarrassment" and he's not about to let that happen to him -- his mantra is "what one man has done another man can do"; this is similar to Ryan, talking to himself in the boiling sunlight, about the fact that "if someone has done this, I can do it too.")  The film traffics in obvious imagery -- we see Ryan chowing down on moist sawdust-like cactus flesh while the two lovers, dressed in evening clothes (Rhonda Fleming sports an almost surrealistically beautiful emerald-colored gown) enjoy roast duckling and steak.  But it's successful and film barrels along at a breakneck pace.  As Robert Ryan hallucinates from thirst, the villain dives into a Santa Monica swimming pool -- it's the opposite of subtle, but effective nonetheless.  At times, the film is even grimly humorous -- in his running monologue with himself, Ryan says:  "I sure wish I'd kept in better shape", as he lowers himself down a twenty foot cliff toward a rattlesnake waiting on a ledge for him below.  The director said that he wanted to make a "silent film" and he nearly accomplishes this feat -- the film is all texture, image, and editing; it's entirely visual with not much in the way of dialogue at all.  Rhonda Fleming is convincingly vicious -- at one point, in the film, she even abandons her boyfriend in the unforgiving desert.  Shot in 3D, the film features a climax in which various detritus is hurled at the camera -- this is, perhaps, the weakest part of the picture, although it's certain fierce.  The movie is also very good in showing how the desert can seem to be a nightmarish inferno to one man while offering another a generous living.  An old desert rat tells one of the characters "the desert's got everything a man needs if a man just knows how to get it."  This picture is tough and realistic, boldly acted by Ryan and Fleming and highly recommended.  (A master of Southwestern desert photography, Lucien Ballard, shot the picture in glistening Technicolor.)