Plunder of the Sun (1953)

August 26, 1953, release date

Directed by John Farrow

Screenplay by Jonathan Latimer

Based on the novel Plunder of the Sun by David F. Dodge

Music by Antonio Diaz Conde

Edited by Harry Marker

Cinematography by Jack Draper

Glenn Ford as Al Colby/narrator

Diana Lynn as Julie Barnes

Patricia Medina as Anna Luz

Francis L. Sullivan as Thomas Berrien

Sean McClory as Jefferson

Eduardo Noriega as Raul Cornejo

Julio Villarreal as Ulbaldo Navarro

Charles Rooner as Captain Bergman

Douglass Dumbrille as the consul

Distributed by Warner Bros.

Produced by Wayne-Fellows Productions, Inc.

I wrote recently about a B film, Railroaded! (click here for my post), that was probably a lot of fun to watch on a Saturday afternoon at the movies, and I feel the same way about Plunder of the Sun. It reminds me of the kind of film I might have watched on television years ago on a weekday afternoon after school. It also happens to star one of my film noir favorites: Glenn Ford.

The film opens with Al Colby (played by Ford), an insurance adjustor and resident of San Francisco, California, in an interrogation conducted by Mexican officials. Colby says that he made a big mistake trying to collect a debt in Cuba and that he doesn’t know anything about a trail of bodies. The officials remind him that he is a guest of Oaxaca, Mexico, that he is a tourist, and they want to know who owns the two guns that they found with Colby. At that moment, members of the United States consul show up, and they ask Colby if he wants to tell his story to them. He agrees. He really doesn’t have much choice because he won’t leave Mexico otherwise. He tells his story in flashback, and it starts a week earlier, in Havana, Cuba.

In Havana, Colby is waiting for a letter, and for money, so that he can pay his bills, including his hotel bill. He’s broke and needs the money to return home. Nothing arrives in the mail that day, and he leaves his hotel and goes to a bar, presumably to drown his sorrows. A woman sitting next to him at the bar starts talking: “Without him, it’s impossible to live. Without him, I can’t live. His kisses, I can never forget. His laughter will forever torment me. It’s useless to try and resist. Because without him, I can’t live.” She’s translating a song that a woman in the bar is singing in Spanish, but that’s not quite clear at first, and Colby—and viewers, too—wonder from the start about this woman and her intentions.

Colby is in Cuba, a tropical locale, with an exotic woman sitting next to him. He’s not immune to her charms, and she lures him into what seems at first to be a strange conversation, in typical femme fatale fashion. After it becomes obvious that she is translating the words of the singer’s song, they start a conversation, some of which reinforces the idea—at least for viewers—that Colby has just met a femme fatale:

• Anna Luz: “. . . I’ve been in Havana for three months, and I haven’t been out after dark.”

• Al Colby: “And what did you do before that?”

• Anna Luz: “Does it matter?”

• Al Colby: “No, I guess not.”

Anna Luz tells Colby that she has no last name, which adds to the mystery surrounding her. It should set off alarms for Colby, but she convinces him to go to her home with her. She leads Colby to Thomas Berrien, who offers him a proposition and $1,000: He wants Colby to leave Havana on the freighter Cinco de Mayo heading for Mexico and take a small package on board. The package contains an antique that was smuggled out of Mexico. Berrien bought it in Havana, and he wants Colby to smuggle it back into Mexico so Berrien can say that he bought it in Mexico.

Colby agrees to the proposition because he is desperate to return home and needs the money to do so. Once he is on the freighter, however, the mystery deepens. By now, Colby is well aware that he is in danger. In voice-over narration, he states as much for viewers:

“. . . It had been a good day. I’d made three, maybe four bosom enemies, rejected a pass from a pretty blond [a stranger on the freighter], and latched onto a half-interest in a package that might contain, for all I know, some pages of an old Sears Roebuck catalog. I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach that there was trouble ahead. I went to my cabin, found that I was right.”

From that point onward, Colby has to navigate through the cutthroat world of stolen antiquities. On the freighter and in Mexico, he meets numerous strangers, and he has to decide who to trust while figuring out his role in the intrigue.

All that I have described so far happens fairly early in the film, and I have not given away any surprises in the plot (no spoilers for Plunder in the Sun) because the plot is straightforward and I don’t want to ruin the fun. If you watch the DVD version of the film, I recommend the DVD commentary with Peter Ford (Glenn Ford’s son) and Frank Thompson, a writer and film historian. They provide lots of interesting details; here are a few examples:

◊ Plunder of the Sun was filmed on location in Oaxaca, Mexico. The Havana scenes and the indoor hotel scenes in Mexico were filmed in a Mexican film studio: Churubusco-Azteca Studios.

◊ The on-location shooting (among the ruins in Mexico) was still fairly unusual. Today, such shooting probably wouldn’t be allowed on historical sites.

◊ Sean McClory plays Jefferson, and it was not one of his typical roles. (I had not seen him in a film before and wouldn’t have known the difference!)

◊ Glenn Ford could be Humphrey Bogart, Sean McClory could be Peter Lorre, Francis L. Sullivan could be Sydney Greenstreet, and you would have The Maltese Falcon.

◊ Glenn Ford did his own stunts. Peter Ford said that his father felt he should do his own stunts, that if he couldn’t do them himself, he shouldn’t be in the film. He enjoyed the physical challenges of an acting role.

I’m not a big fan of categories, and some might argue that Plunder of the Sun is really an adventure film, not a film noir. My answer to that, as always, is that the film can belong to more than one category. Plunder of the Sun does have several noir characteristics: the use of flashback; the femme fatale who pulls Colby into the plot; the constant intrigue and sense of danger; murder and the threat of murder, especially for Colby. However you want to categorize it, Plunder of the Sun is a fun way to spend eighty-one minutes.

The River King (2005)

October 21, 2005, release date

Directed by Nick Willing

Screenplay by David Kane

Based on the novel The River King by Alice Hoffman

Music by Simon Boswell

Edited by Jon Gregory

Cinematography by Paul Sarossy

Edward Burns as Abel (“Abe”) Grey

Jennifer Ehle as Betsy Chase

Thomas Gibson as August “Gus” Pierce

Rachel Lefèvre as Carlin Leander

John Kapelos as Joey Tosh

David Christoffel as Matt Farris

Jamie Thomas King as Harry McKenna

Julian Rhind-Tutt as Eric Herman

Jonathan Malen as Nathaniel (“Nate”) Glass

Sean McCann as Ernest Grey

Distributed by Kismet Film Company

Produced by imX Communications, River King Productions, Spice Factory Productions

Are you thinking that you never heard of The River King? I thought the same thing the first time I learned that Alice Hoffman’s novel was the basis of this film starring Edward Burns. It is a Canadian and United Kingdom production that apparently was never released to theaters in the United States. Instead it went straight to DVD.

Alice Hoffman is one of my favorite writers, although I have not read The River King. I fell in love with another of her novels, Turtle Moon, the first time I read it. Turtle Moon won the Hammett Prize for crime writing in 1992. I always say that I am not very fond of categories, but I just couldn’t imagine why Turtle Moon would be put in the category of crime writing, even though it has a murder investigation and plenty of mystery. I guess I should really ask myself why I keep insisting on seeing it mostly as a love story. But learning that Turtle Moon won the Hammett prize and that The River King was also about a murder investigation prompted me to see the film. (Ed Burns in the starring role of Abe Grey also figured into my decision, I must confess.)

The Hammett Prize is awarded annually by the International Association of Crime Writers, North American Branch (IACW/NA). Click here to learn more from Wikipedia about the Hammett Prize and past winners.

The film is based on Hoffman’s novel of the same name. The body of a student from the local private school, the Haddan School, is found frozen in the river, and Officer Abe Grey and his partner Joey Tosh are given the task of investigating the circumstances of the boy’s death. Some people at the school and in the police department assume that the student, Gus Pierce, killed himself because he had trouble fitting in, but Abe becomes suspicious because he and Joey find a mysterious red substance (which may or may not be blood) under the boy’s shirt. Abe’s investigation of Gus’s death parallels his decision to confront the circumstances of his brother’s death many years ago. In both instances, he has to learn to face the truth.

(This blog post about The River King contains spoilers.)

I was really disappointed the first time that I saw The River King on DVD. Here are some of the questions that I thought the film didn’t answer satisfactorily:

◊ What was the significance of the dripping water on the pan in Abe’s kitchen sink (the noise he hears in a dream one night) and the clicking of a metal pull tab of the shade against the train window when Abe is riding on the train?

◊ What is the significance of the train that Abe is riding late in the film? Viewers see the view out the back of a moving train at the start of the film and again near the end, but what is the significance of these shots? What do they mean for Abe?

◊ How does this view out of the train tie in with Abe remembering what happened to his brother Frank?

I decided to see the film a second time; I thought maybe I could patch together some answers to my questions. A second viewing was a good decision. I discovered that I missed several important details and that the film is actually a bit more complicated than I originally thought. Most of the answers are in the narrative. On my initial viewing, I had trouble making sense of the plot, but not because the plot was full of holes. Details were much easier to spot on a second viewing.

Behind the opening credits and music, music that is both somber and unnerving, The River King starts with several shots of seemingly random and unconnected items. Here are some examples:

◊ Out-of-focus reflections on water

◊ Time lapse photography of sun, snow, and woods

◊ A group of boys or teenagers meeting at night in the woods

◊ Two young boys running through snowy woods

◊ A cube decorated with Chinese characters (the red and gold Chinese box)

◊ Shot out the rear of a moving train showing a winter landscape

◊ Photo of team/girls in bathing suits (a school swim team?)

◊ Abe Grey driving along a road flanked by snowbanks

◊ The two young boys now carrying hockey sticks and running through the woods

After my second viewing, I could see that these shots and the focus on the various items are explained later in the film.

A second viewing also allowed me to appreciate other fine details about the narrative and the film. I realized that conversations in the present continue as voice-overs leading into the past, into flashbacks. The technique works really well, but viewers have to pay close attention or risk getting confused. The way the flashbacks are handled leaves Abe and viewers wondering about their significance in the present, and only slowly is their significance in the past revealed—both to viewers and to Abe. Abe keeps seeing flashbacks from his own childhood, his own memories of a traumatic event. For example, during his initial inquiry into Gus Pierce’s death on the campus of the Haddan School, Abe follows a young boy into a bathroom at Chalk House, where Gus Pierce lived; it’s where Gus is dunked in a toilet by fellow students sometime before he died. Viewers see Abe in the same bathroom, and they hear the louder and louder dripping of water, but does Abe hear the dripping, too? And does it really matter whether he does or not? Probably not, but I certainly wondered about it the first time that I saw the film. Viewers learn later that the young boy is an image from Abe’s past. It’s one of the examples of Abe and viewers being led into the past without any obvious transition or cut.

Abe’s insistence on pursuing his line of investigation into Gus Pierce’s death leads to him resigning from the police department. What he gains from continuing his investigation is on a personal level because the similarities between the circumstances of Gus’s death and his brother’s death years ago force him to come to terms finally with his past. This plot thread is brought to a conclusion, but viewers must pay careful attention throughout the film because many interconnected details are important.

To my credit, some details are emphasized for no apparent reason. One example is the teacher Betsy Chase taking the photograph of Gus Pierce’s bed in his room after his death. It seems to be a link to an odd image of possibly a face in the photograph she develops later in the film, but she seems to be the only one who sees it. One of Abe’s colleagues in the police department examining the photo thinks Betsy Chase just made a mistake. Another example is the tiny fish that Carlin finds in the pocket of Gus’s overcoat, which Gus’s father gives to Carlin as a memento of her friendship with Gus. Does Carlin see the fish as an incarnation of Gus? As simply a connection to Gus? Maybe these points are clarified in Hoffman’s book, but viewers of the film shouldn’t have to read the book to find answers to their questions.

Most of the filming was done in Canada in winter, and it could be argued that the landscape and the weather are like characters themselves. The snow and the cold figure prominently: snow falling; ice forming over the river, even with its currents; snow banked deep along the streets of the town and in the woods. The characters are dressed for the cold: Abe Grey often wears thick boots and a fur-lined cap. The cold, the snow, and shots of quiet woods emphasize Abe’s loneliness and his desire to come to terms with past events. They also emphasize the mood of the film, which is a story filled with uncertainty and restrained class hostility.

One of the underlying themes in the film is how much people hold back to protect others from truths they might not be able to handle. This theme is carried over from Abe’s investigation into his personal life. Everyone has secrets, and several characters keep secrets in order to protect others. The film lets viewers decide if this is a good way to approach others in one’s life, which is a very satisfying way to conclude The River King.