Camino del oro

A well planned and executed train robbery is carried out in silence in twelve minutes. The take is over ten million dollars in gold. Now the six thieves -- Gene Raymond, Wayne Morris, Elisha Cook, Jr, Stafford Repp and Steven Rich -- have to get it past the roadblocks from border to border.

It's a decently done B movie, with some nice talent in front of the camera and behind it, too; Ernest Haller runs a nice camera, with an increasingly filled and claustrophobic screen. A little too much time is spent in chat, but what are you going to do when you're driving a truck several thousand miles, and the voice on the radio is always the same?

Once again, I am impressed by Gene Raymond, whom I had once written off as a pretty-boy actor from the 1930s. This was Wayne Morris' last movie shoot; one he had shot earlier sat on the shelves for a few years.

"Plunder Road" is a low budget crime film with a few familiar faces...and many unfamiliar ones. The leading men you might not be too familiar to you, as the once pretty Gene Raymond and Wayne MOrris are a bit older and more rugged in this film--and I actually think this makes them more believable and I liked their work late in their career. Another one of the crooks is Elisha Cook--a very familiar character actor.

The story is pretty familiar because caper movies were VERY popular during that era. A group of masked robbers bump off a shipment of gold on a train and their planning is meticulous. However, true to most caper films, things start to fall apart during the getaway. The gang is split into teams and one by one, things start to happen to the teams.

Overall, a well directed and interesting cheap film noir flick-- worth seeing if you like the genre and quite engaging. Not among the best of its type (such as "Asphalt Jungle", "The Killing", "Rififi" or "Grand Slam")....but still quite nice.

Plunder Road is an object lesson in what can be done with a low-budget and a stripped-down script. The opening moments, at night under a hard rain, are disorienting, swift, and all but silent. A gang of highwaymen has plotted to rob a train of its gold-bullion cargo. Successful, its members split off onto three separate routes to what they hope will be prosperous freedom. The movie follows them dispassionately as they individually reckon with their fates. This is a marvel of action and economy -- one of the most enjoyable offerings from late in the cycle of film noir.

The most prestigious B crime flick about heists, besides GUNS GIRLS AND GANGSTERS, both of the same period, late fifties, both short, sharp as a knife, with no useless shot, rough, tough gangsters stories, gritty, dark, as I LOVE, for which I would walk through a mine field. What I would not do for today's OCEAN'S ELEVEN like crap, bullsh....material. I regularely watch those films every two or three years, I don't get tired of it. Wayne Morris and Gene Raymond have never been better for my own taste. And Elisha Cook Jr - the ancestor for me of Geoffrey Lewis, I don't know why, - is also terrific, despite a supporting character. No one can get tired of it.

Being primarily a visual medium, one of the things film does best is illustrate the mechanics of complex items. I refer not only to the machinations of the caper plot so well achieved here, but also to big machines themselves -- trains, trucks, assembly lines. Many a great director has used the relentless workings of machines as a metaphor for inescapable fate -- think especially of Fritz Lang and the openings of Human Desire and Clash by Night.

The stars of Plunder Road are the machines themselves -- the overburdened trucks inching their way to freedom, the massive crane and huffing sabotaged train in the rain-pelted robbery scene, the bubbling cauldron at the foundry contributing to the ingenious escape plan, etc. The human characters are sketched briefly, with impressionistic strokes, but it's the mute mechanical accomplices that drive the plot and stick in the mind. This is best illustrated by the cleverly-inserted visit of a smog inspector, and again in the cruelly ironic downfall of the protagonists, who are at the mercy of their guileless vehicles.