Ride a Pink Horse

Set in Santa Fe (dubbed San Pablo in the movie), Ride a Pink Horse is unusual film noir, made in 1946 and directed by its star, Robert Montgomery.  Montgomery had earlier made The Lady in the Lake ( ), also a crime film and remarkable for being shot with a moving subjective camera (first person) in long takes.  Montgomery has some interesting ideas and Ride a Pink Horse is exemplary in one sense -- many film noir invoke war-time experiences as the basis for the nonchalant viciousness of leading characters:  these protagonists are hard-boiled because of the horror that they have endured.  The French first noticed this trait in post-war (and, even, war-time) American crime pictures -- so-called film gris before the tone darkened to noir.  Ride a Pink Horse renders explicit the connection between war-time trauma and post-war crime:  the protagonist, a nasty anti-hero named Lucky Gagin has come to Santa Fe to revenge a war buddy.  Gagin's friend discovered graft involving war profiteering and, apparently, seized as evidence a check written by the military-industrial magnate to a Senator.  The profiteer, Mr. Hugo, ordered the murder of Gagin's friend, a killing left unsolved by a Washington D. C. inquest and so Lucky has come West, riding a Greyhound Bus to San Pablo where the bad guy is holed-up.  Thus, the plot hinges on the unresolved legacy of the World War and the hero's quest for revenge.  Lucky Gagin is not the only guy on Mr. Hugo's tail -- an elderly FBI man, Retz, is also pursuing him.  Another aspect to the plot is the theme of legal versus illegal revenge -- Gagin, acting as a vigilante, plans to take justice into his own hands and, therefore, cheat the government of its rightful prey.

Montgomery plays Gagin, intially, as tough-as-nails, rude, casually racist, and brutal.   He has a nasty metallic cackle for a laugh.  Gagin insults the local women (who, nonetheless, have a hankering for him), calls a teenage girl who pursues him for enigmatic reasons "Sitting Bull" because she seems to be part Indian, and lovingly caresses his "soldier gun" as one of the Hispanic men in town calls it.  The teenage girl seems to be psychic -- she somehow senses what is going on, fears that Gagin will be murdered, and donates to him a little kachina god, a charm against death. (Gagin says his revolver is his "charm against death.")  The action is set during the great festival in Santa Fe and Gagin has no place to stay.  He cruises a cantina called Tres Violetas, and, after a tense initial stand-off, makes friends with a heavy-set Mexican named Pancho.  After the two men get drunk together and bond, Pancho takes the hero to his shack (it's just a lean-to with a cot) and Gagin spends the night.  In the middle of the night, "Sitting Bull", the wraith-like little girl, appears and demands that Pancho, who runs a children's carousel, give her a ride -- this is source of the film's title.  Along the way, Gagin has an encounter with Mr. Hugo, an occasion for fantastically witty and hard-boiled repartee (written by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer) -- Gagin bitterly says that he was "getting a tan in New Guinea" while Hugo was making a fortune off the war; Mr. Hugo is unapologetic.   Hugo's squeeze, a dame with shoulder pads like a fullback, tries to seduce Gagin -- she invites him to "frisk" her but gets nowhere with the invitation.  Gagin is a man on a mission.  Later, Hugo's girl plots an alliance with Gagin -- the film's "MacGuffin", the check to the senator, is worth a million, she says, and she wants Gagin to be more aggressive in his negotiations with the boss.  With the fiesta in full spate, Gagin is lured by Hugo's moll into a dark alcove and there's a knife fight. Gagin kills his assailants but is badly wounded.  With Sitting Bull's help, he staggers away from the brightly lit and festive parade into the gloomy barrio where Poncho protects him from the thugs on his tail -- Poncho takes a beating while Gagin rides the carousel under a blanket hiding him in a carousel pew where the prophetess sits beside the wounded man.  This part of the film is genuinely nightmarish, a counterpoint between the indifferent joyous crowds and the dying man staggering around in gloomy alleyways.  Gagin becomes delirious and mistakes Sitting Bull for his war buddy from New Guinea, the man murdered by Hugo.  At the climax, Gagin who is hallucinating confronts Hugo and his thugs -- this being a highly literate film with script by Hecht and Lederer, the fireworks at the climax are mostly verbal:  Hugo delivers a tirade about the chumps like Gagin who do the right thing but end up losers anyhow.  The FBI man is present and gives a speech too and, then, Gagin, of course, surrenders the evidence (it's concealed in Sitting Bull's brassiere) to the G-man and the film ends.  In the last couple scenes, Gagin, somewhat repaired, has breakfast with the government cop who says that he "loves to eat with his hands"  -- he's tearing through a big stack of tortillas with huevos rancheros in the Tip Top Cafe.  Gagin goes to see Sitting Bull for the last time and, although the scene is set up for a romantic denouement,   the ending is better and more surprising -- Sitting Bull is too young for the badly damaged war veteran, Gagin, and she ends the film with a flourish of Spanish, re-telling the story of the strange gringo and his adventures to her friends.  Eddie Mueller, who presents the film on his TMC show Noir Alley, says that the ending changes the whole film -- we thought it was about Gagin, but the story turns  out to be about the girl and, in fact, is narrated in a language that most of us don't know.

The picture is well-shot -- a particularly noteworthy sequence-shot involves thugs beating up Pancho while the camera focuses on Sitting Bull hiding Gagin in a pew on the carousel; with each rotation, we see that things are getting worse and worse for Pancho.  But Pancho, of course, is a true friend, unlike the false friend of the dame with Hugo, and he's the film's resident philosopher -- a little of this goes a long way, but it's effective nonetheless:  Pancho (Thomas Gomez) knows that life is suffering and that it's only reliable pleasures are tequila and friendship.  Hugo is spectacularly malevolent -- but he's an odd villain as well, rather polite, articulate, and forced to use a hearing aid (when he talks on the phone he shoves the receiver against a little black box dangling from  his chest.)  The picture is exciting and well-written -- it's a little-known gem.  The movie's producer, a woman named Joan Harrison, worked with Hitchcock and the film has some of the Master's elan.  But the film seems to me to have been quite influential -- the mask-like enigmatic face of Sitting Bull as she prophecies seems to me to be the source of Marlene Dietrich's fortune-teller in Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (also shot by Russell Metty -- the extended take in the opening scene in the San Pablo bus station is also echoed by the famous long-take at the beginning of Welles' thriller.)  The scenes of violence concealed within a festive crowd resonate with similar sequences in Hitchcock films (for instance the beginning of The Man who knew too much) and have been much imitated -- the climax of Brian de Palma's Blow-Out during the Independence Day festivities in Philadelphia, for instance, is an example of a sequence in which the danger faced by the heroine is contrasted with a parade, fireworks, and mobs of happy revelers.  Ride the Pink Horse is an interesting picture, surprising on all levels, and very effective as a thriller.