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"Calcutta" was one of Alan Ladd's most successful movies of the 1940s (even out-grossing "The Blue Dahlia") and is a fun combination of film noir and adventure. Alan Ladd and Gail Russell made a beautiful couple, and I was sorry that they made only two co-starring vehicles together.

Some critics resented the fact that Gail Russell was the villainness of the story, but I have to disagree. It added irony at the end, and debunked the type-casting limitations so many stars of that period had to suffer through. She was a real beauty! As well, the supporting cast is excellent, in particular Broadway's Edith King. Without a doubt, this is a typical Alan Ladd "star vehicle" of the period -- to be enjoyed for what it is (a fun "Terry and the Pirates" type vehicle), and not to be over-analyzed.

It's the stars that make this film watchable: Alan Ladd and Gail Russell.

The story is OK but these days with all the brilliant crime/mystery movies and series on TV and cable, "Calcutta" comes across as pretty lightweight.

A couple of pilots, Neale Gordon and Pedro Blake played by Alan Ladd and William Bendix, who fly cargo over the mountains between Burma and India just after WW2, investigate the murder of fellow pilot Bill Cunningham.

Neale Gordon is suspicious of the motives of women young and old, but falls for his dead friend's fiancé, Virginia Moore (Gail Russell), while keeping his former romantic interest, Marina Tanev (June Duprez), on hold. After a lot of punching and some surprising slapping around of Miss Moore, things get sorted out.

The film was set in a fairly convincing backlot Calcutta, but it could have been set just about anywhere. The strongest influence on the film seems to be "The Maltese Falcon", especially the ending. In fact, Edith King as Jewellery dealer Mrs King is somewhat of a Sydney Greenstreet character.

I must admit I am still an Alan Ladd fan dating from many a Saturday matinée back in the 1950s. He had a quiet confidence that projected strength, and although this film is a bit blah, he carries the picture. Apparently he was one of the genuine nice guys and loyal; more than a couple of people always got work on his films, but he was also a tragic figure - gone too early aged 50.

But there is an even more tragic star in this film, Gail Russell, who died aged only 36. This was fairly early in her career and critics at the time thought she was miscast. However that sense of hesitancy and innocence was fine for the role even though her performance was pieced together from short takes; she was so nervous she could hardly get her lines out. In a recent biography by Steven Glenn Ochoa, "Fallen Star", he tells how she had a nervous habit of ringing her hands, which directors tried to stop, but it's obvious in one of her early scenes in the film. Ladd was very good with her on set but not everyone was like that in her career.

It's these two charismatic stars and their unique screen presence that still makes "Calcutta" worth a look.

Three buddies, who are commercial pilots based in Calcutta, regularly fly cargo across the Himalayas between India and China. When one of them is murdered, the other two set out to find the killer. Beginning with a suspicious bank deposit and a carved diamond pendant, the pair uncover the victim's mysterious fiancé, a suitcase full of jewels, and another murder. Set in an exotic location on Paramount Studio's back lot, director John Farrow's "Calcutta" looks fabulous and has a competent cast, but the story is little more than a routine whodunnit, highlighted by John F. Seitz's rich black-and-white cinematography. Despite a few colorful supporting characters along the way, the plot develops without surprises, and viewers will guess the villain and the outcome long before the hero does.

Not the most expressive of actors, Alan Ladd plays Alan Ladd in the guise of Neale Gordon, the pilot who investigates the murder of his friend; Gordon, who is already involved with a Russian singer, becomes intrigued by his buddy's fiancé, played by Gail Russell. Gail Russell is not all that expressive either, and Pedro Blake, the third pilot, is William Bendix as William Bendix. Fortunately, the parts are undemanding, and the emphasis is on action and unraveling the plot.

Nominated for seven Academy Awards over his career, Seitz lensed such classics as "Sunset Boulevard," " The Lost Weekend," and "Double Indemnity." Seitz made movie stars glow like movie stars, and, in this film, he lavished his attention on Alan Ladd's blonde good looks and, to a lesser extent, on Gail Russell's dark beauty. Ladd even whips off his shirt to give audiences a look at his trim abs, although he radiates his handsome best while dressed in a white dinner jacket. Fans of Alan Ladd will relish "Calcutta" and savor the opportunity to freeze-frame several glamor shots of the star that are literally breath taking. While the film is not bad, just predictable, "Calcutta" is passably entertaining and a sturdy vehicle for Paramount's reigning star of the 1940's, Alan Ladd.

Routine mystery suffers from Ladd's seeming indifference to his character in the lead and Gail Russell's unsuitability for her role. Add into that the fact that they share almost no rapport on screen and it hurts the picture. Gail, a lovely actress whose looks had not been destroyed by her extreme alcoholism at this point, is too gentle a presence to be convincing as the sort of femme fatale that was Ladd's frequent partner, Veronica Lake's stock in trade. The best performance comes from supporting player Edith King, in her screen debut, as the shady but very fun Mrs. Smith who though it's never stated outright is obviously the local madame as well as involved in other shady doings. The picture comes to life whenever she enters the scene. It's a pity her role isn't larger. Otherwise this is a standard actioner, which despite the title could have been set anywhere since it's mostly set indoors, that the studios pumped out weekly to keep product in the theatres during the Golden Age.

Alan Ladd and William Bendix are airline pilots based in Calcutta, flying the hump into China. They're surprised when fellow pilot John Whitney tells them he's going to get married. At first it looks like it's going to be a modern-dress version of GUNGA DIN. However, when they return to Calcutta, they find out Whitney is dead, with fiancee Gail Russell saddened by the news, and in possession of an $8,000 gem she says he gave her. He also had $35,000 in the bank, which is preposterous. With an assortment of exotic characters in the fringes and the police investigating, Ladd begins to poke around on his own.

It's a Maltese-Falcon sort of story, shot cheaply and accurately by John Farrow to appeal to Ladd's profitable audience -- so long as the budget didn't get out of control. It's shot mostly on interior sets, with one long shot of Ladd driving through the Paramount backlot, made up to look like Hollywood's idea of India.

Ladd always looks a little odd in these movies. His suits fit him, but seem to swim on him, and he keeps his lines short, clipped and just this side of surly, expressionless and with his lips barely moving, as if he were a ventrilogquist. The rest of the cast is filled out with minor names, although the crowd scenes are well stocked with extras. Seton Miller's script is serviceable, and it's another movie well turned out for all hands.

When William Bendix plays a man named Pedro, you know there's a problem.

It's post-war. Neale (Alan Ladd) and Pedro (the aforementioned Bendix) have taken the opportunity to fly cargo from Chungking to Calcutta, and the reverse. They have to go over the Himalayas. The money is good.

Sadly, they learn that their friend Bill, who was about to be married, has been murdered in Calcutta. They are determined to find out who did it.

Neale visits his fiance (Gail Russell) and wonders how it is that she is wearing an $8,000 necklace. The two spar, and she throws him out. Neale then learns that Bill had a lot of money in the bank. Could he have been involved in smuggling?

I saw a video of this where the sound was very fuzzy. For me Gail Russell threw this film way off kilter. Consider that Calcutta was made in 1945 and not released until 1947. That means that it was made one year after Russell's debut in "The Uninvited."

This is a different woman. Her alcoholism is already affecting her. She is a nervous wreck and soft spoken, demonstrating not much of a character or personality. Also, as one of the stars of the film, she's hardly in the movie. I do not think originally it was intended to be that way.

There is a big performance by Edith King, who may know something about what happened to Bill, and probably does run a brothel. June Duprez is on hand as a beautiful club singer who has an on-again, off-again relationship with Neale.

I love Alan Ladd - handsome, tough, a strong presence in films, and I enjoy watching him no matter the movie. William Bendix is always wonderful.

However, there's not much of a story and as far as Calcutta - I maybe saw one Indian. Hollywood's idea of a foreign country was to put white people in white suits and leave it at that. Also, given what was going on in India at the time, it's never mentioned in the film.

One bit of trivia - in Calcutta, as in Saigon, the plane Ladd is flying loses its right engine. As a result, cargo has to be dumped from the plane to lighten the load. Identical situation. And always the right engine.

Calcutta is far from Alan Ladd's finest hour on the silver screen (nor director John Farrow's, for that matter). His trademark contempt for women and his android-like affect prove unappealing and tedious when not undercut by plausible psychology or fleshed-out co-stars. Here he has nothing but a murky Asian hodgepodge of noir cliches to wade through, the inevitable William Bendix at his side (and, this time, on his side). Trying to solve the murder of a fellow trunk-line pilot working the route from India to China, he drifts from hotel to casino to airfield encountering a rogues' gallery of grotesques. Edith King, as a stogie-puffing Baby Jane Hudson, promises more than she delivers; Gail Russell, the black widow of the piece, is kind of like Mary Astor to three parts water. This is one film from the noir cycle whose obscurity gives little cause for regret.

This film, which actually was one of Ladd's most financially successful films of the 40's, is a fun ride. Surprisingly, it's reputation has been one of a potboiler. It moves swiftly and has many good twists and turns. Gail Russell is wonderful and breathtakingly beautiful as the mysterious femme fatale. Alan Ladd was very well matched with Gail Russell. More so than Veronica Lake with her stony blonde beauty. The beautiful darkness of Russell and the Blonde Ladd was much more interesting. They were close friends and it shows in their two feature films together. A lot of the TV prints of this films have scenes missing that are crucial to the plot so if you can get a hold of a complete version of Calcutta you will be very lucky. A fun film from the 40's that you should try and catch up with.

Gail Russell too soft, lovely and vulnerable to be the bad girl in this somewhat boring film. Too much dialogue and not enough action. June Duprez underused. Do not get the feeling of being in India. Really just another detective story. Almost no more than one flying sequence. Ladd plays it cool and indifferent with Chinese shop keepers. Ladd in all his sartorial splendor. Ladd a good looking guy when young. Light colored suits worn by Ladd and others give testimony to lack of air conditioning in those days. This is best reference to a very hot Calcutta climate. Man whose murder Ladd is trying to solve is only seen in one or two sequences at beginning of film. Very easy to forget what he looks like for such a good buddy of Ladd and Bendix.

The team of Alan Ladd and William Bendix, as good friends off the screen as is shown on the screen in Calcutta, is the only real reason to watch this potboiler of an adventure story. The version I saw had several minutes cut out of it that were crucial to the plot.

Ladd and Bendix play a pair of pilots ferrying cargo and passengers from Chungking to Calcutta and back over the 'Hump' which is what the pilots in wartime called the Himalayas. The native people there more picturesquely called the mountain range, 'the roof of the world'. It was a dangerous run and these guys decided to keep doing it and make some money after World War II. You can see the flag of Nationalist Kuomintang China on their flight jackets.

Anyway a third buddy of there's John Whitney greets them in Calcutta after a dangerous run in which cargo had to be dumped and announces he's getting married. Ladd who has a loose relationship with June Duprez, and Bendix both don't think terribly much of the idea, but congratulate him anyway.

The next day Whitney is strangled in the streets of Calcutta and Ladd and Bendix like in The Blue Dahlia the previous year are on the trail of the culprit. The first stop is Whitney's fiancé, pretty Gail Russell, who knows a lot more than she's telling. Let's just say that a whole lot of pilots are being made out to be saps.

Tremendous events were going in both India and China at the time that Paramount was making Calcutta on their sound-stage yet from the story you would never know it. No hint at all is made about the Communist insurgency in China and in India you would think the British Raj was going to last another hundred years. Not one word about it in this potboiler of a plot which the Films of Alan Ladd says resembles Terry And The Pirates.

Probably Calcutta would have been a lot better had we seen more of Bendix in the film. That's always good for any picture. However he gets to try and earn a living for the two of them while Ladd stays in Calcutta to solve the mystery. However it's Bendix who hears something from merchant Paul Singh that he tells Ladd about that starts the whole thing to unravel. Later on Bendix runs some interference with the British police that allows Ladd to stay free and solve the case.

Calcutta is so typical of the potboiler films Ladd did and carried on the strength of his personality. It hasn't much else to recommend it.

Superficially, an unusual noir, set in an unusual location, with Alan Ladd and William Bendix unusually cast as commercial pilots, working out of Calcutta. Beyond the final credits, it's the superficial, rather than the unusual, which leaves a pervading after taste.

The two flyers undertake some serious detective work following the shocking and unfathomable murder of buddy and fellow pilot John Whitney. Their investigations lead to a gambling joint run by smarmy, oily Lowell Gilmore and to Whitney's girlfriend, bewitched, bothered and bewildered Gail Russell. The trio of key characters is completed by mysterious, shifty Paul Singh. If 'Calcutta' is to be believed, one of comparatively few Indians resident in the city. His beady eyes and smug, evasive, answer for everything demeanour land him firmly on Ladd and Bendix's radar.

Singh is also central to one of the movie's more playful moments, sprinting across the tarmac in hot pursuit of a rapidly departing plane, whilst pilot Bendix gazes on quizzically.

There is something lightweight and one dimensional about 'Calcutta'. Even the violent finale is more snuggle up on the sofa with a mug of cocoa than perch on the edge of a seat chewing yer fingernails. The paramountly watchable Ladd, the ever likeable Bendix and the exemplary female leads gamely endeavour to curry audience favour, but the results are seldom more than pleasantly palettable. The reality is that 'Calcutta' barely generates enough spice to make a chicken korma.

Neale, Pedro and Bill are three high-flying, hell-raising pilots on the Calcutta-Chungking route. But they are brought down to earth when Bill is murdered for no apparent reason.

A fairly entertaining whodunnit mystery starring Alan Ladd as a man who don't trust women. He has a suspicious mind but that comes in useful when investigating the death of his friend, and encounters a smuggling racket, thugs who like to strangle with a rope and murder. There's enough twists and turns to keep you interested. Gail Russell is charmingly innocent.

This is a film noir in the unusual setting of Calcutta. Set during World War Two, it features American flyers who were flying over the Himalayas ('the Hump') between Calcutta and Chungking in China, and other Chinese cities in the south of China, a region which was not occupied by the Japanese. However, the War itself does not come into this story at all, and instead it is concerned only with the personal stories of the flyers themselves. Alan Ladd is the lead, a flyer whose close friend Bill has been mysteriously murdered, and he wishes to get to the bottom of it. So he and his fellow flyer Pedro, played by William Bendix, try to investigate. In the course of this a mysterious girl enters the story, played by velvet-eyed Gail Russell. The murdered friend was going to marry her, and Alan Ladd looks her up to see if she knows anything. He immediately falls for her, leading to complications. He sees that she is wearing a very expensive diamond and is surprised when she says her murdered fiancée bought it for her. Ladd says, but he didn't have that kind of money. This leads him to investigate where he bought it from, and he sees the proof that his friend really had a lot of money which he should not have had. A massive smuggling racket is then revealed, extending to millions of dollars and sacks of jewellery, a stash of which Ladd discovered in one of his planes. The smugglers are prepared to murder anyone who gets in their way, so it is clear what has happened to the murdered Bill. But there are deeper and deeper plots, and there is also the question of Gail Russell's role in things. Is she the innocent creature she seems or is she some kind of femme fatale who is capable of anything? A smoothie named Eric Lasser (unctuously played by Lowell Gillmore) seems to be a kingpin. Or is he? Are the police in on it? And what is the role of the jolly and guffawing Mrs. Smith (heartily played by Edith King)? Can she have people killed just as easily as she can sell them diamonds? It is all good watching, and far from boring.

Neale Gordon (Alan Ladd), Pedro Blake (William Bendix), and Bill Cunningham are fellow pilots flying the mountain route between Chungking and Calcutta. Bill is newly engaged to Virginia Moore (Gail Russell) and gets murdered. His friends start digging.

This has a bit of exoticism. It has Alan Ladd. It has some noirish elements. Virginia should be played like the damsel in distress or even a femme fatale, but Gail Russell can only play her like a neighbor's wife. I also don't like her description of the relationship with Bill which cuts it down at the knees. For the exotic element, they are using too many Chinese people. It's supposed to be Calcutta after all. There is some good turns and Alan Ladd is playing up the noir. Mainly, I would like Gail to change her performance.

It was a second movie of Ladd-Russell, this small Noir-adventure is quite interesting, one biggest hits of the tiny Alan Ladd, took place at India where he portraits an aircraft pilot Neale Gordon side by side with two closest friends Pedro Blake (William Bendix) and Bill Cunnigham (John Whitney), everything goes upside down when Bill out of the blue advises them is about to marry with an American girl Virginia Moore (Gail Russell) letting those die-hard bachelors baffled, to worse at same night he was found death throttled by rope at Calcutta's alley, Neale bitterly annoyed starts an own act of factfinding to get any hint to take the murder or mastermind, reaching in smuggling of jewelry thru airplane into China.

Well is a summarized plot, take a look individually on Gail Russell's character, is quite noticeable her nervous break down on stage, some reliable sources point out that Gail had to drink to calm down a lit bit to able to act, reading her mini-bio stay clear since tender age Gail has a stage fright, thus question remains, why her family allowed such painful plight goes along, some critics said that Gail Russell looks like Hedy Lamarr, a keen eye should acknowledge such statement, anyhow it ends up tragically when Gail still at mid-age was victimized by alcoholic addicting to act fearless.

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First watch: 2024 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 7.

I like Alan Ladd but this is one of his weakest films. No plot. No excitement. Gail Russell is attractive but couldn't act if her life depended on it. She has the same facial expression throughout the film regardless of the scene. When she's told her fiancé has been murdered-no expression. When she's making out with Alan Ladd- no expression. If only Veronica Lake had been available. Ladd is always good. This was still at a time when they had him take off his shirt in every movie. And the Calcutta we see is entity on the Paramount backlot. Maybe with some decent writing, some villains, maybe a plot, this could have been something Quite a bore.

Calcutta was a big hit upon its release, and I can easily see why. It's Hollywood escapism at its finest. Every frame of the film is eye candy to the nth degree. Alan Ladd never looked more beautiful. Hell, no man ever looked more beautiful. Gail Russell and June Duprez are beautiful. The Hollywood version of Calcutta is beautiful, and its exotic doors and windows frame the actors beautifully as well. The film has a relatively short running time (83 minutes), an exciting, and necessarily fast-paced story, and a lot of twists and turns that will keep viewers until the end (and, after the end, as exactly what happened is never very clearly explained). But the story is almost irrelevant to the appeal of the film -- it's merely an excuse for all of the beautiful people, drinking, fighting, smuggling jewels, double-crossing one another, making love, while acting uber cool and looking breathtakingly beautiful the entire time. Josef von Sternberg, who was known for making films in studio versions of exotic locations with beautiful stars and gorgeous photography once said that the best stories don't come from novels or plays, but from newspaper articles. Film isn't really about plot. Film is a dream fantasy -- and Calcutta is pure dream. Okay, it's a male-oriented fantasy: Ladd has two gorgeous women in love with him (and despite the Production Code restrictions, he obviously sleeps with both), who he basically treats like crap... sexy, smoky-voiced nightclub singer, June Duprez is willing to accept his "playing the field"; and packed with guy style adventure (Ladd comes off as a cross between James Bond and Indiana Jones)... but who's complaining. Just sit back and enjoy the dream.