Plunder of the Sun (1953)

Best movie of this year hands down!

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Thin, ultimately silly film is given unearned heft by virtue of Jack Draper's cinematography which turns ancient Mexican ruins into the nightmare city of classic noir, the wet streets and shadowy alleys that are the essence of the genre. Glenn Ford is sour and surly as an American insurance man who travels the tropics with a full wardrobe of tweed suits (maybe that's why he's so grim). Down on his luck in a vividly evoked pre-Castro Cuba, he signs on to smuggle a certain antiquity BACK into the Mexico from whence it came for reaasons that never make much sense. Soon there are three or four factions vying for whatever he has taped under his left nipple: a sleazy archaeologist (Sean McClory), an American hot thang with plasticene-brassiere breasts that jut like nose cones (Dianna Lynne), a sultry hispanic gal (Patricia Medina), and finally some kind of Mexican expert and his thug son. There's too much fist fighting over a gun--Glenn and Sean duke it out about four times over Sean's Colt Detective Special--and the whole thing never makes much sense. But damn, it looks GREAT! Don't know who this Draper guy is--he seems mostly to have worked in Mexico--but his deep focus photography really brings the location to menacing, palpable life. The best passage follows as Ford evokes the ruins and what they mean to dim, pointy-titted Lynne, and it's pre-PC so he's able to make vivid the human sacrifice that blasphemed the place and thus give it a vibration of tragedy and death otherwise unearned in the movie. The other delight is McClory's debauched archaeologist, under a blonde crewcut and some heavy tortoise-shell specs. He's very vivid and far more charismatic than the dreary, mumbly Ford The movie really looses it in its climax, and ends in a silly shootout and fistfight in a backlot Hollywood set that wastes all the good will it had built up with the location work; suddenly, it looks like early TV and in a sense it has become early TV.

Near the beginning, in Mexico, Glenn Ford goes up to the bar and the bartender has on a sweater. A second later, at another angle, the sweater is gone!This is an interesting, archaeological treasure hunt flick. The story is pretty good and the characters interesting.I only wish it had been filmed in color so the beauty of the ruins could be seen by all. Nevertheless, even in black & white it is still beautiful.This movie could easily be remade and brought up-to-date. Any number of today's top actors could fit into Glenn Ford's role.

Not much of David Dodge's novel remains in this film version, other than the names of some of the characters and the basic plot. American insurance investigator Al Colby is hired to smuggle a package out of Havana and into Oaxaca, Mexico. When the man who hired him is murdered aboard ship, Colby decides to find out what he is carrying and why it is worth killing for. Unscrupulous antiquities dealers, disgraced archaeologists, and desperate women all clash in a search for buried Zapotecan treasure. Glenn Ford is serviceable as Al Colby, but the plot is murky, the characters are under-developed, and the location is inexplicably changed from Peru to Mexico. Although it is long out-of-print, copies of the book are still relatively easy to find (unlike prints of this film, which is still tied up in Wayne estate litigation), and reading the book is a much better use of one's time.

David Dodge's novel is brought to the screen with Ford excellent as protagonist Al Colby. The script however, plays fast and loose with the novel, changing the locale from Peru to Mexico and now the search is on for Aztec artifacts instead of Incan. All things considered, this is a tightly directed and well acted tale. It has not been available for viewing as it seems to be tied up in litigation along with "Island in the Sky"(1953) and "The High and the Mighty"(1954)as the Wayne Family battles Warner Brothers and we are the losers.