Alaska Passage

'Peyton Place' meets 'Hell Drivers' in this outdoors seventies exploitation film about truckers which happened to be made in the fifties.

Rugged Bill Williams' path is crossed by two foxy females: high maintenance blonde Lyn Thomas and feisty redhead (at least that's what she looks like photographed in black & white) Nora Hayden (best known for her next film role in 'The Angry Red Planet').

Edward Bernds was more known for his westerns and science fictions movies than the rest. It is cheap, fast done, forgettable but pleasant to watch. This one is the perfect example, there were dozens of them in the thirties, forties and fifties, less in the sixties though, replaced by counter culture, hippies, drug addicts and Wild Angels topics. This story seems to be a copycat of many forties movies; remember Andy Devine's features directed by the likes of Christie Cabanne or William Witney. But those ones were more comedy, less serious than this one. This very movie seems to be a tribute to this lost genre: adventure B movies, but with a bit touch of Fritz' Lang's HUMAN DESIRE. Do not confound it with ALASKA SEAS though, a Jerry Hopper's film far better than this one.

Edward Bernds who as a producer/director is mostly identified with the Bowery Boys produced this northern frontier melodrama about a pair of men who share a partnership in trucking company. Bill Williams is the hands-on management type while Leslie Bradley is the front office guy. What brought these two together as business partners God only knows, but the affair Williams is having with Bradley's wife Lyn Thomas will definitely drive them apart.

Thomas is the reason to see this B film, she's one piece of work. This could have been a plot for the Northern Exposure series. Fortunately for Williams he has good girl Nora Hayden.

Shot on location for nickels and dimes Bernds did not splurge for color and that's a pity. Some colorful Alaskan rustic characters are part of the plot as well.

But Lyn Thomas really owns this film

Bill Williams plays the part-owner of a trucking company in Alaska who runs into trouble due to landslides closing down roads, a business partner who doesn't think Williams is running the company properly and wants to squeeze him out, and his partner's hot blonde wife, with whom Williams had a fling before she was married--and she still wants him. To further complicate matters, a pretty and leggy hitchhiker shows up, takes a job as a waitress in the local diner and sets her sights on Williams, much to the annoyance of Williams' former paramour. This is one of Fox's lower-budget programmers, but it's not all that bad. Williams is earnest, Nora Hayden--the waitress--is a real looker, and the location footage in Alaska helps a lot. The film is hurt by pedestrian writing--courtesy of the film's director, Edward Bernds--and flat performances by a weak supporting cast, but overall it's worth a watch if you've got nothing better to do.