Roadblock

Joe Peters (Charles McGraw) is a no-nonsense insurance investigator. He unwillingly gets involved with chiseler Diane Morley (Joan Dixon). Later, he's investigating suspect Kendall Webb (Lowell Gilmore) who happens to be Diane's man. He has fallen for her and willingly corrupts his morals.

The story is told in a straight and narrow fashion like Joe's initial character. His downward slide is just as straight. There is a coldness to the stiff telling. It does have a car chase through the Los Angeles river bed. I wonder if it's the first or at least one of the first. It's also quite an epic walk off to end the film.

"Detour" is far more famous. And it's probably better. But this strange little movie moves as inexorably to a terrible end as "Detour" does.

Charles McGraw was an excellent actor. He is fine here as "Honest Joe" Peters. He encounters Diane, a woman he never ought to have encountered, on a plane ride. He is a straight-arrow insurance investigator. She is looking for a rich man. She knows he isn't rich and she is not really painted as a villain.

Joan Dixon plays Diane in a deadpan manner. She is pretty and has a soft, rather high voice. Maybe she was someone's idea of an Elizabeth Taylor lookalike. There are similarities.

Everything is understated. Yet it's a tough movie. And it's powerful, and sad.

Drop a laurel wreath on Charles McGraw's huge, sculptural head – you can almost see it in the Greco-Roman wing of a museum, perched atop a pedestal. He was one of the noir cycle's most serviceable pieces of furniture, along with Raymond Burr and Elisha Cook, Jr. Most often he lurked in the murky background, but sometimes, most memorably in The Narrow Margin, he stayed front and center. He also shuttled uncomplainingly between the underworld and the keepers of law and order. Starring in Roadblock, he tries to straddle both worlds.

This no-frills noir opens with a tease: McGraw stages a murder, then abducts a witness whom he manipulates into buying his way out of certain death with the loot from a bank job. But the movie is setting up McGraw as a straight-arrow insurance investigator who'll stop at nothing to achieve his goal.

Until he crosses paths with Joan Dixon, that is. A crafty gold-digger, she finds him sweet but `honest;' she's saving her sexual artillery for more affluent game, which she finds in a smooth racketeer (Lowell Gilmore). But McGraw can't get her out of his blood and, knowing that furs and jewels are the path to her mercenary heart, strikes up a deal with the mobster. He offers him a million-and-a-quarter, insured by his company, which he knows will be traveling by train; if Gilmore pulls the job off, McGraw will settle for $400 grand.

The irony – and the script's least convincing turn – is that Dixon falls for McGraw anyway and renounces her grasping ways. (Not only does this ring false, it also makes her far less arresting a character.) Despite second thoughts, McGraw gets his share of the take. Then, naturally, he's assigned to the team of investigators trying to crack the case....

Harold Daniels, who had a brief and largely undistinguished career as both actor and director, keeps the action swift and simple – it races down an hour-plus of highway until it reaches its titular roadblock. The movie goes down as easily and satisfyingly as a hot dog and a beer.

This is a typical film noir of the period and , in my opinion, this is no bad thing. It follows all the typical patterns of a hundred other B-movies of a similar type of it's day. Shadowy photography, good man laid low by the femme fatale, a few seedy gangsters thrown in, all the ingredients are there. If you're not a big fan of noir then you might switch off after 30 minutes exclaiming that "I've seen it all before", and you'd be right. Personally I love the genre and thought this was a competently made movie with good performances by the leading actors. McGraw is perfect as the law-abiding detective seduced into lawlessness by the siren of the piece (Dixon).

If you like film noir check ROADBLOCK out. If you don't then maybe this movie's not for you.

I love this movie. I almost fell out of my chair the first time I saw it, 15 years ago on AMC. I could not believe McGraw was actually given a role like this. So often we see him as the heavy with a gun, not a woman, and we certainly never see him in love. He displays the right amount of angst and regret in this movie. The movie,though not great,is an example of what McGraw could do when given the right material and good direction. Too bad he was not given more roles like this. I have always felt that if McGraw had been with another studio, i.e.Warner Bros. which specialized in turning tough guys into leading men e.g. Cagney, Bogart,Raft, he would have had a better chance at becoming a leading man like the aforementioned actors,if not a more recognizable presence in movies. He certainly COULD have had more LEAD roles in "A" movies. Anyway, the movie is predictable in that you know Peters is not going to get away with the money. What is surprising or interesting is that the movie doesn't explain how Joe and Diane end up together. In one scene she is telling him he does not make enough money and a FEW scenes later she is smashing glasses in disgust and then professing her love for Joe. The ending is typical of movies of this sort. But it is an interesting movie in that we get to see "MAC" demonstrate feelings, probably for the first time in his career-no doubt due to his being typecast. Joan Dixon is okay as the female lead but I don't think she was the best choice. I guess she was given the role because Howard Hughes was "interested" in her career and was trying to mold her into another Jane Russell. Milburn Stone, Louis Jean Haydt (excellent character actor), and Lowell Gilmore (wonderful in "The Picture of Dorian Gray") are on the mark in their respective roles. Peter Brocco, the criminal at the beginning of the movie, is used to good effect here. (He and McGraw worked together in the "Narrow Margin" and "Spartucus". In fact,you can see the two talking in the latter during a gladiator film sequence; McGraw's "Marcellus" is stooped down talking to Brocco's character when he rises to watch the gladiators train). Mercedyz