Death in Small Doses (1957)

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

Pretty Good

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Chuck Connors steals the show in "Red Skies of Montana" director Joseph M. Newman's "Death in Small Doses" as a long-haul trucker addicted to illegal amphetamines in this criminal expose. The movie opens with a reckless trucker gobbling Benzedrine pills who has gone too long without sleep and then hallucinates that a car has swerved into his lane traffic. He tries to avoid smashing into the oncoming vehicle, plunges his rig down the side of hill and dies in the crash. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C., launches an investigation into this epidemic. They dispatch a clean-cut, square-jawed agent (Peter Graves of "Stalag 17") to infiltrate the trucking business and come up with a lead. Everybody that Tom Kaylor runs into while he masquerades as a student driver either is addicted to 'co-pilots' or dies from them. One guy dies from a heart attack that was connected to his amphetamine abuse while loading up Kaylor's truck. As Mink Reynolds, Connors lives at the same boarding house as Kaylor. Mink is strung out constantly and living perilously on the edge as if there is no tomorrow. The guy can get neither enough action nor enough amphetamines. He pushes them on Kaylor, but Kaylor doesn't buy. Eventually, even a workhorse like Mink succumbs to their dire effects, and reluctantly divulges to Kaylor the name of his source. Earlier, Tom had been training as a student driver with an older, more mature trucker, Wally Morse (Roy Engel of "The Naked Dawn") who knew how deleterious the drugs were. Morse stuck his neck out too far snooping around and got beaten to death at a truck stop while Kaylor was sleeping in the back of the cab. Now, with the tip that Mink gave him, Kaylor has a solid lead. Ironically, he discovers that the woman, Valerie 'Val' Owens (Mala Powers of "Rage at Dawn"), who runs the boarding house where he lives, is up to her ears in the amphetamine racket. Incidentally, she was married to the guy at the beginning of the movie who wrecked his rig and rolled it down a hillside. The criminals nab Kaylor and take him to remote spot where they intend to kill him when one of them changes his mind and helps Kaylor defeat them. The beauty of this concise, efficiently helmed, black & white, 79-minute film is that Newman doesn't waste a second. The dialogue is sharp, too.

A drugs movie with a difference. This B-Movie was designed to show the dangers of prescription drugs, in this case amphetamines such as Benzedrine or 'bennies' as they are called here. Joseph M Newman was a better director than he was given credit for and he handles the somewhat sensationalized material well enough. The cast, (Peter Graves, Mala Powers, Chuck Connors, Merry Anders) are strictly bargain basement and the script is something of an embarrassment but it's nicely shot on location by Carl Gutherie and there is some decent stunt driving and as the bottom half of a double bill it's not that bad.

Peter Graves is a federal agent trying to find out the source of the amphetamines that is killing and driving insane so many long haul truck drivers. An opening segment shows one of the long haul truck drivers trying to stay awake and downing "bennies" as they call them here to the point where he sees cars where there are none, and swerves, crashing his truck and dying, grabbing the viewer's attention.Tom Kaylor (Graves) goes undercover as a student truck driver. He moves into the rooming house run by the widow of the dead truck driver from the opening segment.Tom keeps asking for bennies from people who he thinks might be selling them, and getting rebuffed - practically with a sermon - every time. His first partner on a long drive actually opens up to Tom about the bennie business and how the pills are killers and how he is going to ask around to see if he can find out who is supplying them. He winds up beaten to death.There are a number of suspects as usual in this kind of film, and it keeps you guessing as to whether they are in on the pill business or just afraid of crossing those who are. The end is rather anti-climactic as the person who is the guilty party doesn't evoke either anger or sympathy from the audience. Plus the opening segment makes you believe that Kaylor is after a "Mr. Big", and this person hardly comes across like that.The best part of this film is seeing Chuck Connors of "The Rifleman" TV fame, which is a role that is to come only a year later,as a perpetually hyped up hepcat amphetamine addict of a truck driver, "Mink", who also lives in the boarding house with Tom. It's worth the price of admission just to see him hammily - and figuratively - climbing the walls.I'm giving this five points for Chuck Connors' cheesy performance and for the great roadhouse atmosphere of a bygone era - of boarding houses, transistor radios, cramped ma and pa diners with friendly service, of long haul working stiffs just trying to make ends meet. Then there is the sympathetic treatment the actual addicts are given. Considerable time is taken to show how some of the addicts got trapped in the web of addiction with a good dose of empathy.

Capable genre director Joe Newman directed this magnetically tawdry tale of a federal agent trying to crack a drug ring that preys on long-haul truckers. This is no French Connection, but it's a fascinating glimpse of a bygone era, and if one has a taste for low-budget AA features of the fifties this one is definitely worth a look. Peter Graves makes a fine Viking hero. There's a pseudo-adultness here of the sort one used to find in cheap paperback novels that were basically semi-porn but masquerading (or trying to) as exposes of one sort or another. As with Dragnet, one has to have a certain kind of empathy to get into the spirit of this sort of thing. If you do, this one will reward you handsomely.