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.
Review of Plunder of the Sun
