Flucht nach Mexiko

Sleekly gorgeous Debra Paget looks about as comfortable on a hardscrabble ranch as Paris Hilton would in a convent. No wonder she takes off with former boyfriend Ray Milland when he shows up at the door. At least he likes money better than scruffy cattle. Pity grimy husband Anthony Quinn left in the dust when the shower doesn't work, the oven blows up, and he shows more concern for calf serum than a night on the town. But then, as we find out, things are not as uncomplicated as they look.

Interesting if not very believable melodrama. The first half presents intriguing mind games between the three main characters, but bogs down in the last third. Nonetheless, the story strays some distance from the usual, with a few unexpected twists and turns. Milland's character is certainly not geared to winning new fan club members, while Paget standing around in her underwear shows why the real life Howard Hughes reserved a special cottage for her.

The movie must have cost a $1.80 to make since hardly anyone gets on screen but the threesome, while the action takes place either somewhere in the boondocks or on a cheap outdoor set. And when Paget runs from a speeding car to the safety of a cornfield, I wondered if the writer of North by Northwest was taking notes. Had the script played up the mind games to the end, we might have had a real sleeper. But the early promise settles in for a more conventional wind up; at the same time, the last scene borrows from the ironical caper film The Killing from the year before. All in all, I expect an obscure film like this has gotten a much bigger audience from cable TV than it ever got in theatres. A must-see for fans of cult director Allan Dwan.

The River's Edge is directed by Allan Dwan and adapted to screenplay by James Leicester from the story "The Highest Mountain" written by Harold Jacob Smith. It stars Ray Milland, Anthony Quinn and Debra Paget. A CinemaScope production with colour by De Luxe, music is by Louis Forbes and cinematography by Harold Lipstein.

Ben Cameron (Quinn) and his wife Meg (Paget) are struggling to make their New Mexico ranch function as a happy working home. Enter shifty Nardo Denning (Milland), who has a past with Meg and has ulterior motives for suddenly appearing on the scene…

"You know, if you were on a desert island with that guy and there was nothing but rocks, pretty soon he would have all the rocks moved to his side of the beach"

Falling somewhere in the void between Noir and Western, The River's Edge is a delightfully sly and compact thriller that also boasts gorgeous location photography and splendidly garish colour compositions.

It was kill or be killed all the way down to The River's Edge!

Narratively it's a straight case of two men and one girl who wind up on the lam, with the foxy gal bouncing back and forth between the two men's affections like a ping-pong ball on legs. All three characters are flawed, their means and motivations deliberately scratchy, it makes for a near kinky noir love triangle, with dialogue that's often cynical or deliberately obtuse. The two guys are polar opposites, Denning is a spiv like manipulator, a dastard, Cameron is muscular but sincere, while Meg, with her shock of red hair scorching the landscape, has a murky past and is either confused or playing the cards close to her chest? Something is going to have to give...

In the mix is violence, potent violence at that, a suitcase full of cash and the perils of the terrain that the trio traverse. It's with the latter where Dwan and Lipstein come to the fore, the Scope photography and framing of characters amongst the Mexican locales (Cuernavaca, Morelos), really belies the B budget afforded the production. Were it not for some cheap looking studio interior shots-the remarkable recovery of one character after an accident-and a twist in the ending that should have gone the other way, this would be better thought of than just being considered a B movie culter.

Neon pinks and grubby greens mingle with shady grey characters for a whole bunch of fun. 7.5/10

Fox's Region 1 DVD features a very decent print and a detailed commentary track by noir aficionados James Ursini and Alain Silver.

Debra Paget is walking out on Anthony Quinn and his miserable ranch. Between the scorpions in her shoes, mud in the water tank, and her throwing out the calf medicine that cost $11, she doesn't see any chance. Up drives Ray Milland in a pink Continental convertible. He's just conned someone out of a million dollars in cash, and he wants to hire Quinn to get him across the border to Mexico so he won't have to explain ten thousand $100 bills. He also wants Miss Paget, his old girl friend, who's still in love with him.

Allan Dwan's 132nd feature movie -- he also directed 272 short subjects -- is a fine little morality play, with the performers giving him, as they so often did, excellent performances. The subtext is, alas, too close to the surface to offer much subtlety, as it so often was in his last decade of directing, but the way he shoots the Mexican mountains harks back to his earliest shorts, when he showed his talent for making the landscape part of his story.

Watching The River's Edge today put me in mind of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre. Just imagine if one of those treasure hunters had been a woman on the trip. Think they had problems then?

Ray Milland is the Fred C. Dobbs of the piece. Only he's not looking for gold, he's got a valise with a lot of money in cash. A notorious grifter he's on the run and headed for his former girlfriend Debra Paget. He wants the services of her current husband Anthony Quinn who is a guide and tracker to take him across the Mexican border and away from the law.

Given Paget's beauty and her involvement with both of these men you can imagine what a tense trip this was. Milland commits two murders along the way, that of a US Border Patrolmen and Chubby Johnson an old prospector

Like The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre 90% of the film is focused on the three leads. At no time is anyone truly sure of how they stand with each other. Paget the most confused of all, she loves her husband Quinn in her own way, but Milland is the guy who always scratched her itch.

In the end what happens to Milland is almost eerily reminiscent of what happened to Humphrey Bogart in the previous film. And as I wrote in my review of The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre, God really does have a sense of humor.

Not a western but a well shot and performed drama set in the West. The story is rather ordinary but benefits from the role reversal of Ray Milland, usually the hero and Anthony Quinn, often the heavy but in opposite roles here. Even at the relatively brief running time the script could have been tightened a bit but overall a good film. One caveat-it would take a great deal to make a woman as stunning as Debra Paget was in her prime look bad but the filmmakers almost achieve that feat. Saddled with unflattering makeup and frightening Lucille Ball red hair that never moves no matter what travail she is enduring her beauty is almost completely obscured.