A Strange Adventure

Young hot-rodder Harold Norton helps out at the family motel. He falls for seductive guest Lynn Novak who is joined by two men. They turn out to be robbers. They have an inside man for their armored truck heist. After losing a guy, they need a new getaway driver.

This is a crime B-movie. Everything is generally B in this one. Sadly, it's a scale from A to B. The acting is broad melodramatic or stiff. The production is weak. There are holes in the story which includes a whiplash weather change. It's all very 50's. It needs better action to distract from all the bad acting and general problems.

Colorized? Republic stagey look instead of Sierras stopped making films 1958

"A Strange Adventure" is a film made by Republic Pictures shortly before the studio stopped making movies in favor of TV programs. As the studio was having financial trouble in 1956, it's not surprising that the film has no major stars and a relatively low budget. Also, while supposedly set in the Sierras, the film appears to have been made in a sound stage.

A trio of crooks have committed an armored car robbery. However, the leader, Al, is a real head case. He kills the armored car driver for kicks and it's obvious he just enjoyed killing. So, when they capture three people along the way, it's soon apparent that he'll eventually kill them as well...so it's a case of the kidnapped folks biding their time to see if there's any chance of escape in their mountain hideout.

So is it any good? Well, it's partly good. Jan Merlin is great as the psychotic boss. And, the story is GENERALLY good...but also falls apart at the end due to some serious logical errors...too many just to ignore.

I have just finished viewing this film on a Kino Lorber dvd, and it is one beautiful print. The sound is good, and the optics are as fresh and sharp as they must have been when the film first came out in 1956. Granted the script is a bit pedestrian, but Marla English sure looks great in a swim suit, and Ben Cooper's hot rod would be a winner at any classic car show. For those who are wondering, the State of California maintained a number of isolated mountain cabins for government hydrologists whose job it was to measure the snow pack throughout the winter. Luther and his sister Terry were state employees, and that is why a state-of-the-art "snow cat" would be sent to investigate when they stopped transmitting data. The Kino Lorber dvd includes a very informative audio commentary by film historians Toby Roan and Jay Dee Witney.

This poor attempt at producing a movie fails over and over. Terrible bursts of music that might wake up the sleeping audience. Dumb characters. Good people are dumb and bad people are dumb. The music should have been dum, dum, dum, dum.

This could have been a sexy, robbery gone wrong, cute good girl, beautiful bad girl, even prettier young guy male lead, Ben Cooper action suspense adventure. My guess is the director was spending too much time studying for his grade school graduation test and he could not devote enough focus to this. Hey, the viewer can't focus on this either.

Beautiful cars in the first half of the movie. A bit of a look at a supermarket of the 1950s. Good hairstyles and make up for all the cast. They don't ever look stupid. That's just the way they act. They are all good actors, but this contrived bunch of nonsense never gives anyone a hint of reality or danger or intelligence.

What happened to the money? They needed a few more scenes when they ran out of film. I know where it was when we last saw it, but what happened to the money? Where's the money? Ben could have done so well if he could have rewritten each of his scenes. He should have been shirtless in the snow with the girl searching for the dough. Ben never got his Bonnie and Clyde role. This could have been like that with just a few changes on each page.

Tom Willett

I do not know director William Witney, never heard of him before and doubt very much that I will in the future on the strength of this mediocre effort.

The film's greatest merit is its clear photography. The script has more character inconsistencies and holes than Swiss cheese (Marla English keeps jumping from the arms of Jan Merlin to those of Ben Cooper and back, and no one seems to mind as plain-faced Joan Evans starts smooching Cooper too, for instance).

Merlin has the plum role, playing the nefarious, impulsive, trigger happy but not stupid Kutner. What detracts from a successful performance is the poor script that has him suddenly and needlessly kill a compliant security van driver, then fail not kill Cooper when he could and probably should. Although he uncovers Cooper's and Evans' ploy involving a portable radio, he fails to detect that blocked nose, constantly sniffing Nick Adams has replaced the heist dough with pine cones, and finally crazily places himself in the line of fire.

Supposed femme fatale English is not that fatal, except to herself (she gets a stiff prison sentence). Besides traveling between the arms of Merlin and Cooper, and leaving a gun for the latter to pick up and point at Merlin, English's most memorable moments involve her light clothing and high heel shoes while everyone else wears warm clothes and the snow builds up outside.

Pretty boy Cooper seems in love with English, then falls for Evans. You can see that he is the one who can do something to turn the tables on Merlin and Adams, but at the crucial moment he fails to make meaningful use of the gun English gives him. He also drives a car needlessly fast when he is not even being chased - the script never clarifies whether he is just a fast driver by nature.

Talking about Nature: the sudden change from sunny weather to snow is too improbable for words. How Cooper and the authorities track down the heist stash hidden in the snow is never explained, you just learn that Cooper and Evans are getting a reward for returning the proceeds, when a minute earlier Cooper kept repeating that he had had nothing to do with replacing the money with pine cones, and had no idea where the dosh might be.

Too many character motivation holes, not enough action, bad script. Waste of valuable time.