I always enjoy this Alan Ladd potboiler - it was the movie that introduced me to Ladd, and also director John Farrow, and whenever I think of either filmmaker I'm inclined to think of Calcutta more than say Shane or Hondo. I've already reviewed it on this blog so I'll only make some random observations:
* June Duprez's performance gets worse every time I see this. It's not that bad a role - I mean, yes she does pine, but she gets to be a lounge singer as well. But she's wooden and off form.
* Gail Russell's performance gets better every time I see this. She seems so fragile and helpless - she makes a fantastic femme fetale. I'd rank her better than Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon, in part because you'd more obviously believe/fall for Russell with those massive eyes. That final line "I'd hate to have killed you" is brilliant.
* Alan Ladd is great in this sort of role - tough, vengeful, misogynistic. But he struggles to convince that he falls for Gail Russell in anyway. Come to think of it, I can't recall Ladd being that effective in love with anyone on screen. Maybe in The Great Gatsby or The McConnell Story.
* The support cast is very strong. In addition to the always reliable William Bendix, there's great turns from Edith King, Lowell Gilmore and Paul Singh. The Paramount stock company weren't as strong as Warners (Rains, Greenstreet, Lorre, etc) but they do pretty well. The same could be said for the art department.
*It's really not fun to watch Ladd literally slap a confession out of Russell at the end.
*I generally tend to like films Seton I Miller writes. I will note his tendency to rip off other movies though - there's three musketeers of guys, two of whom are unhappy when one of them gets married (Gunga Din); the final confrontation where the man goes to the woman "he wouldn't have gone there alone you must have come with him" (The Maltese Falcon); the fat criminal (Casablanca, only here it's a woman).
*It's not very British (I think there's one British character in it, a cop) and not even that Indian. Really it could have been called "Saigon" or "Shanghai" or "Rangoon" just as easily.
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