Saigon

Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake co-starred for Paramount in three classic films, This Gun For Hire, The Glass Key, and The Blue Dahlia. Their fourth and final film was Saigon and it doesn't rate in the category of the other three.

Saigon has Ladd as a recently discharged Army Air Corps pilot who has not headed back to the USA, but hung around the Orient watching out for a buddy Douglas Dick who has had multiple surgeries due to head wounds. Dick has a platinum cranium courtesy of the war and the Army Medical Corps, but he's dying, he has maybe a month or two left.

Ladd and another of his crew Wally Cassell are hanging around to make Dick's life or what's left of it, happy. For that reason they accept a flying job to Saigon, no questions asked from Morris Carnovsky who is carrying a lot of cash from shady wartime dealings and Veronica Lake. They're getting $10,000.00 for the flight.

Lake and the cash get away all right, but Carnovsky is detained by the police who are firing at Ladd's plane as it is taking off. With them thinking Carnovsky is dead, the four are at liberty. Dick falls hard for the sexy Lake and Ladd wants to keep her around to make him happy in his last days. What a pal.

All these elements come together in a bloody climax that I will not reveal. The idea of a story about a dying soldier was handled far better the following year by Warner Brothers in The Hasty Heart.

This was also the second Alan Ladd film with a far east city title, the other being Calcutta from the year before. Although this film is better than Calcutta, it's still cut from the same routine action/adventure mold that Calcutta was taken from. And like Calcutta you would never know the problems that were happening in French IndoChina as the Viet Minh were starting their guerrilla war for independence against the French Colonial occupying power. Said power here is represented by Luther Adler who as always is giving a great performance.

Veronica Lake left Paramount the following year and Alan Ladd would follow a few years after that. Too bad their screen partnership ended on a mediocre note.

Saigon is the end of the line for Mike Perry (Douglas Dick). As a Captain in W.W.-II, Perry had taken a wound to the head, enduring 6 months of varied and complicated surgeries. And, as a crowning glory, earning a plate of platinum to match the medals on his chest. Despite the efforts of the best doctors, he is fading fast; only he doesn't know it. Rather than telling him and sending him home to die, Mike Perry's pals, Maj. Larry Briggs (Alan Ladd) and Sgt. Pete Rocco (Wally Cassell) decide to keep him on the move with them, as they travel the Far East. To cram "100 years of good living" into 2 months...maybe less. (For the rest, the only similarities with THE BLUE DAHLIA are 3 army-pals (Jimmy, George and Buzz), and 1 pal with a W.W.-II head-wound (Buzz).)

However, good living comes at a price: Larry Briggs and both boys take a flying job, offered them by the unscrupulous Alex Maris (Morris Carnovsky), and for a payment suspiciously high $10,000 suggests something more akin to smuggling rubies, than to an innocent business trip as Mr. Maris calls it. But then again, that kind of money could set thing up nicely for Mike Perry.

Shady deals often involve shady ladies. Just as the arranged flight is supposed to take off, Mr. Maris' secretary Susan Cleaver (Veronica Lake) appears on the scene, dressed in a leopard coat. Her demeanor is anything but sweet, a quality enhanced, when anyone reaches for the briefcase she carries; but something about her captures Mike's attentions… and Larry's. The attraction might have been a passing fancy, if Susan Cleaver didn't now find her lot thrown in with the boys', when the sound of gunfire triggers an emergency take off. Amidst much protest, Susan is bundled in, up, and off to Saigon (nowadays called "Ho Chi Minh City", Vietnam).

Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd amaze me with their sensitive portrayals, they give so much! Susan Cleaver and Larry Briggs are characters with a past, melancholy, but not devoid of all feeling, of all hope. In one scene, Larry Briggs points to a mark on Susan Cleaver's face, where she had been slapped. "Is this where he hit you?" Larry asks, leaning over to kiss the spot. "There, now it doesn't hurt anymore." Susan shows indifference, almost loathing… until he leaves the room. Then she turns slightly, resting her head against the bedpost….she's falling for him... There's another marvelous sequence involving an evening gown (made by Edith Head). Susan comes out of her hotel room, finding Larry on the adjoining balcony. Susan is resplendent in draped white. Larry walks up to her; Susan turns around to give him the full view, her usually straight face softened into a sweet expression. Gingerly, Larry takes the back collar of her gown, which is actually a hood, and frames Susan's beautiful face. Larry looks at her for a moment, and then with the same gentleness, lets it back down. "No. It looks better the other way, with your hair showing."...

I like "Saigon" very much. Performances are really excellent all the way around. Tender scenes are played with sincerity, as are the lighter moments that lend relief to this melodrama. Unconcerned with strict adherence to plot, it delves instead into character study, and is the better for it. It gives us the why, when and where, and leaves us to discover the how. The suspense and adventure are wonderful...the romance too!

I really look forward to the moment, when this great movie will be released on DVD; NTSC-VHS copies of this film are scarce nowadays. My proposal: a Veronica Lake DVD-box with Veronica's other scarce films, like "The Blue Dahlia", "The Glass Key", "I Wanted Wings" and "So Proudly We Hail!"

Robert

Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake end their four-year partnership on a low note, Saigon (1947). This film and another one, the name of which escapes me, demonstrates that Hollywood knew very little of the population of Saigon. There were a lot of Americans and not much in the way of Vietnamese.

Major Larry Briggs (Ladd) is told that one of his war buddies (Pete), has a brain tumor and only a few months to live. It sounds like that tumor Bette Davis had in "Dark Victory", glioma of the cerebellum. Larry decides not to tell him. He and his other buddy Mike want to give Pete the most fabulous time of his life.

Opportunity comes when Briggs is hired for $10,000 by Alex Maris (Morris Carnovsky) to fly a plane to Saigon. It must leave by 6 p.m. It doesn't. At 6:30, Maris' secretary Susan (Lake) arrives, and we hear the sound of gunshots. Susan insists that they wait for Maris. Briggs refuses. He takes off with his two buddies and Susan.

The right engine goes out and the plane lands in a swamp. Prevailing upon the natives, they finally make it via oxcart to Saigon. Eventually Larry learns that although Susan claimed $78 on the card she filled out at the hotel, she has an absolute fortune in a briefcase.

Meanwhile, Pete has fallen hard for Susan, and Briggs asks her to be nice to him - she is a rather cold person. However, knowing Pete's story, she goes along.

The problem with this film for me is that there really isn't a plot. You have to fill it in yourself. Maris is a nefarious businessman and is sending Susan to Saigon in order to pay for something. He obviously has been involved in some illegal wartime dealings.

The movie just sort of meanders along. I really like Ladd and Lake, both had great presences. The Cassell character drove me insane. The excellent stage actor Luther Adler plays the mens' boss, Lt. Keon.

A little trivia - I also watched "Calcutta" starring Alan Ladd. Just as in this film, in the beginning, the right engine of the plane goes out and, just like this film, they have to dump boxes, etc., whatever is in the plane. Same scene. And I guess it's always the right engine.

Like Singapore, Calcutta and Macao, Saigon sets off to an Asian port of intrigue. Demobbed in Shanghai after action in the Pacific Theater, three flyboys postpone their return to the States because one of them, Douglas Dick, has only a month or two to live. The catch is that he doesn't know it; his pals Alan Ladd and Wally Cassell guard the secret, having decided, under cover of operating lucrative commercial flights, to pack `a whole lifetime' of excitement and pleasure into his brief span left.

Their first assignment, however, proves their last. Shady war profiteer Morris Carnovsky pays them a suspiciously large sum to take him to Saigon, the `Paris of the Orient.' But, detained by police and gunshots, he doesn't show for the punctual flight; instead, they carry his `secretary,' Veronica Lake, carting along a briefcase crammed with half a million. The crate they're flying has to crash-land, and they make the rest of the journey by boat to Saigon, giving a romantic triangle time to form: Both Dick (avidly) and Ladd (reluctantly) fall for Lake. But a police inspector (Luther Adler) just happens to be aboard as well....

Yet another romantic adventure in subtropical heat, Saigon owes much to John F. Seitz' solid camerawork (which deserves special mention for avoiding ceiling fans). It's pretty by-the-book, but not nearly so embarrassing as Ladd's Calcutta of the previous year.

The movie marks the last screen pairing of Ladd and Lake, an emblematic couple in the noir cycle noteworthy for their chilly emotional temperature. Whatever cryogenic chemistry they generated in This Gun For Hire and The Glass Key and The Blue Dahlia had by this time, alas, gone inert; few sparks get struck this close to absolute zero. Only the perfunctory conventions of the genre insist that their future together will be either a long or a happy one. Even that pretense is belied by the movie's final shot – in a cemetery.

SAIGON was the last teaming of ALAN LADD and VERONICA LAKE, and sorry to say, it's also their least satisfying effort.

It's the buddy theme again, with Ladd and WALLY CASSELL trying to protect their buddy, DOUGLAS DICK, from the truth that he doesn't have long to live--and then getting involved in an adventurous tale of smugglers, loot and murder. VERONICA LAKE turns up to join the trio for a cloak and dagger sort of tale that pits the three buddies against the villainous LUTHER ADLER.

Neither Ladd nor Lake is seen to best advantage here and the script, as well as their seeming indifference to the storyline, is the real problem. Paramount apparently made this one in a hurry to cash in on whatever remained of the star chemistry Ladd and Lake once had, but they got poor returns for their efforts and didn't invest enough time to create a good enough script.

For Ladd and Lake fans, it's strictly below average as entertainment.