Plunder Road

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.

Moviecut—Plunder Road

source: Plunder Road

$10 million in gold is being shipped by rail to San Francisco from Salt Lake City. Five men are determined to see that the gold doesn't make it. The men successfully pull-off a daring nighttime robbery and snatch the $10 million. Their plan includes loading the gold into three different trucks. At regular intervals, they set off for the coast where they intend to rendezvous and split their loot. Will they make it? (This is a film noir - you know things are bound to go horribly wrong.) Plunder Road is a nice little low-budget noir/crime/drama film. While I enjoyed every second of the movie, the highlight for me has to be the robbery that takes up at least the first 15 minutes of the film's 72 minute runtime. Similar to Rififi, the robbery is carried out almost entirely in silence. The plan is well thought out and executed. The coordination between the five guys makes for a great watch. Director Hubert Cornfield expertly filmed this section of the movie. He wisely included almost every detail - from the masks to the gassing of the guards to the handling of the explosives. Some of the camera angles Cornfield chose helped to increase the excitement of the whole thing. I also think that filming the heist in pouring rain was a wise decision. The rain added even more suspense and atmosphere. While I'm not overly familiar with most of the cast (Elisha Cook, Jr, being the exception), they all give nice performances. I think I was most impressed with Stafford Repp as Roly Adams, but that may only be because he's familiar to me having played Chief O'Hara on Batman in the 60s. Plunder Road's ending is appropriately bleak. As with most good film noir, none of the characters comes out unscathed.

A bunch of criminals working together to perform the perfect crime: we've seen it many times before and after, but nowhere as magnificently as in Plunder Road. The camera shots are marvelous, sometimes you wonder what it means you're looking at but it never bores. Great movie. Will see it many more times again, mashallah.

A well planned and executed train robbery is carried out in silence in twelve minutes. The take is over ten million dollars in gold. Now the six thieves -- Gene Raymond, Wayne Morris, Elisha Cook, Jr, Stafford Repp and Steven Rich -- have to get it past the roadblocks from border to border. It's a decently done B movie, with some nice talent in front of the camera and behind it, too; Ernest Haller runs a nice camera, with an increasingly filled and claustrophobic screen. A little too much time is spent in chat, but what are you going to do when you're driving a truck several thousand miles, and the voice on the radio is always the same? Once again, I am impressed by Gene Raymond, whom I had once written off as a pretty-boy actor from the 1930s. This was Wayne Morris' last movie shoot; one he had shot earlier sat on the shelves for a few years.

Copyright 1957 by Regal Films, Inc. Released through 20th Century- Fox. No New York opening. U.S. release: December 1957. U.K. release: 13 January 1958. Australian release: 24 April 1958. 6,476 feet. 72 minutes. SYNOPSIS: A gang of five robs a gold train bound for the San Francisco mint. COMMENT: The two films Hubert Cornfield directed for Regal are the best of the series, and "Plunder Road" is the better of the two. (The other Cornfield entry is "Lure of the Swamp"). With only a handful of exceptions, almost invariably the other films in the series are over-talkative, desultory affairs with little action and virtually no suspense or tension. "Plunder Road" is a complete negation of the usual Regal modus operandi, the exception that proves the rule. From its gripping opening sequence, tension never falters. Of course, Cornfield's incisive, driving direction cannot rate as the only factor. The ingenuity of the Ritch-Charney script must also share the credit. Sure, it's an old plot, told many times before, but the variations here are most intriguing. The casting is A-1 too. Gene Raymond, Wayne Morris and Elisha Cook hand in their usual reliable portrayals, Jeanne Cooper makes an attractive heroine, whilst scriptwriter Steven Ritch contributes a stand-out performance as a nervous wheelman. Cornfield's direction is not flashy, but as said above, it neatly combines an unrelenting pace with tingling suspense, and keeps audience interest at an uncommonly high pitch. Locations are used to advantage, enabling the story to peak at a satisfying climax. Veteran cinematographer Ernest Haller (Gone With The Wind, Mildred Pierce, Rebel Without a Cause) has a chance to show us what superior work he can really do (unlike his lackluster camera-work on Christian Nyby's "Hell on Devil's Island"). In fact, "Plunder Road" is easily the best photographed Regal Film of all.

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.

Certainly a lot of atmosphere from the 1950s on display here, and we are on the road plenty. One is definitely drawn into the program, and it is difficult not to be interested in the details of all that is passing by before our eyes on the screen. The expressive faces, which are so strongly captured by the camera, may seem uncomfortably close at times, especially since they aren't faces of what we may call appealing folks. Keep in mind that with no counter-balance from hero figures, it may be easy to fall into rooting for some of these bad guys. A grim, stark, and memorable viewing experience.

Director Hubert Cornfield's heist caper "Plunder Road" was made when Hollywood prohibited criminals from getting away with their criminal endeavors. Five men, Eddie Harris (Gene Raymond of "Red Dust"), Commando Munson (Wayne Morris of "Paths of Glory"), Skeets Jonas (Elisha Cook Jr., of "The Maltese Falcon"), Roly Adams (Stafford Repp of ABC-TV's "Batman") and Frankie Chardo (Steven Ritch of "Seminole Uprising"), stage a daring night time robbery of a train transporting gold bullion to San Francisco. The first ten minutes or so concern the actual hold-up itself with the hoodlums gassing the guards and slugging the train engineer unconscious. The next forty-five minutes depicts the road trip that the robbers take in three separate vehicles. Eddie and Frankie cruise along in a tanker truck. Commando and Skeets drive a rental truck with coffee used to conceal their load of the bullion, while Roly drives a truck carrying furniture. Cornfield has pared this crime caper down to its absolute essentials. Roly is caught first when he doesn't make it through a roadblock because he leaves his police band radio turned on. He makes a futile effort to get away, but the police shoot him in the back. Eddie and Frankie roll up not long afterward and spot the authorities taking Roly's body away in an ambulance. Meanwhile, Commando and Skeets pull up to fill up at a gas station. Commando gets into a conversation with the old-timer who is filling up the truck. The old-timer inquires about his oil. When Commando raises the hood, his automatic pistol falls out and he has to murder the attendant. Finally, Eddie and Frankie make it to Los Angeles without incident and smelt their gold bullion down at a warehouse. Pollution officials interrupt Eddie and company and write them a citation. By this time, Eddie's girlfriend Fran Werner (Jeanne Cooper of "The Intruder") begs him to call things off, but Eddie complains that they have gone through too much to back out now. Our protagonists melt the gold down into hubcaps and other body parts for a Cadillac and cruise onto the freeway when disaster strikes. As Frankie is tooling along the freeway, they pass an accident, and a woman driver behind them spends too much time rubbernecking at a crashed car and rear-ends our protagonists. Naturally, the uniformed cops appear to help untangle the bumpers when they notice that Eddie's car has a gold bumper. There isn't much room for characterization in this taut drama. Similarly, there isn't much sentiment either. Cornfield generates suspense and tension from the moment that the thieves pack up the bullion and head cross-country to Los Angeles. Naturally, scenarist Steven Ritch, working from a story by Jack Charney and he, has to dream up ways for the thieves to blunder. If only Roly had kept his police radio turned off. If only Commando has kept a close watch on his automatic pistol! Why did Eddie have to melt the gold into a rear bumper? Couldn't he have melted the bullion into other car parts? Remember, back in the 1950s, crime didn't pay, so our protagonists are simply living on borrowed time. Nevertheless, "Plunder Road" is qualifies as a suspenseful, white-knuckled exercise in crime.