Plunder Road (1957)

Three trucks filled with extremely heavy bricks of solid gold, stolen from a fast moving train in the most clever way, becomes the caper of the century in this fraught with tension action drama where veteran actors Gene Raymond, Wayne Morris, Elisha Cook Jr. and several others make an attempt to transport it without being caught. As soon as the train theft is discovered, police across the nation are notified, and every highway is being scoped for the culprits. This becomes riveting simply to watch the five men in various states of paranoia in three different trucks driving down these highways of potential destruction, their lone thoughts driving each of them crazy in different ways. Cook is the most thoughtful of the five, planning to take his son down to Rio to start a new life, practically certain of his success, and even getting the viewer to sort of feel sorry for them. Raymond has a girl (Jeanne Cooper) waiting for him at the end of the line for the final stretch, but for a few of them, their road isn't paved with gold; It is paved with doom.Yes, the Jeanne Cooper I mention above is the same Jeanne Cooper who schemed and loved and clicked her well manicured nails together for four decades as the wealthy and powerful Katharine Chancellor on "The Young and the Restless". She only pops up for the last twenty minutes of the film, but makes the most of her scenes, especially as she reveals how she wishes that her lover had not stooped to theft to make their dreams come true. But the fact that she obviously abandons a job to help him shows her as complicit, and she even goes as far as to help push the gold up large loading slides, showing that she's made of stronger stuff than most women, yet not as quite as evil as the great film noir femme fatales. If you want to see Ms. Cooper really in action on the big screen, check her out in the prison drama "House of Women" where she goes up against "Another World's" Constance Ford with a great cat fight.While this film is tense and riveting at times, it also often becomes an absurd look as to why crime doesn't pay and the desperate measures criminals take to get away with their latest caper yet are constantly paranoid of what the end will bring. It is like they know that they will be caught. Only fools run in the face of arrest, and often that spells a meeting with the grim reaper. Raymond, Cooper and his young partner (Steven Ritch) go through so much in the last few reels that watching them makes you see how absurd it all is, that no heist is easy, and that when it all comes out in the open, they are not going to go down without some gunfire. In general, this is a pretty good caper action/thriller that is obvious as to how it will end, but what makes it unique is how each of the criminals reveals some of their back story to indicate what brought them to such desperation, and how their own inner psyche manipulates their individual destinies.

Strong B-Film Noir directed by Hubert Cornfield. Steven Rich's story and screenplay stars Gene Raymond as Eddie Harris, a professional thief leading a group of amateurs in a well thought out plan of robbing a train bound for the San Fransico mint. About $10 million in gold bullion is split into three trucks and begin a treacherous trek to Los Angeles. Each piece of the successful heist is traveling along separate routes; but two are intercepted. Eddie manages to reach the destination, but he must outmaneuver the outrageous L.A. traffic to escape capture.A 72 minute action, crime flick with a good share of tension. Other players: Jeanne Cooper, Elisha Cook Jr., Wayne Morris, Stafford Repp, Naura Hayden and the writer, Rich.

Enjoyable B movie, nicely shot in black and white and "Regalscope".Wonder if the writers had seen the 1951 British comedy THE LAVENDER HILL MOB which had a similar solution for smuggling gold bullion as the last car in this? It is always a little dispiriting to know in advance with crime thrillers in this Production Code Enforcement era, that no matter how clever the crooks or plotting, they won't get away with it, and there will be a shift in sympathy away from the criminals at some point (the gratuitous murder of the garage owner.) Hubert Cornfield went on th o make some more interesting movies including PRESSURE POINT and NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY with Marlon Brando.

Being primarily a visual medium, one of the things film does best is illustrate the mechanics of complex items. I refer not only to the machinations of the caper plot so well achieved here, but also to big machines themselves -- trains, trucks, assembly lines. Many a great director has used the relentless workings of machines as a metaphor for inescapable fate -- think especially of Fritz Lang and the openings of Human Desire and Clash by Night.The stars of Plunder Road are the machines themselves -- the overburdened trucks inching their way to freedom, the massive crane and huffing sabotaged train in the rain-pelted robbery scene, the bubbling cauldron at the foundry contributing to the ingenious escape plan, etc. The human characters are sketched briefly, with impressionistic strokes, but it's the mute mechanical accomplices that drive the plot and stick in the mind. This is best illustrated by the cleverly-inserted visit of a smog inspector, and again in the cruelly ironic downfall of the protagonists, who are at the mercy of their guileless vehicles.