Cinema: The New Pictures, Sep. 16, 1957

3:10 to Yuma (Columbia). “Safe?” sneers the marshal. “Who knows what’s safe? I know a man dropped dead from lookin’ at his wife.” By that standard, moviegoers will be safer at this picture than at home. The marshal is trying to “deppytize” a passel of Hollywood tender-seats to convey a captured dry-gulch artist (Glenn Ford) cross country to catch a train, but the bandit’s gang is on the lurk, and the cowboys aren’t having any. They leave the job to a drought-poor homesteader (Van Heflin) who needs the money ($200) to buy water for his cattle. From there on, it is hard to tell whether the moviemakers intended to parallel or to parody High Noon. The camera keeps a nervous clock watch as the alive-or-deadline approaches—in this case, the arrival of the 3:10 to Yuma. And the sound track keeps suggesting, with the insidious plucking of a panicky guitar, that the moviegoer’s heartbeat should be getting faster and faster. Too bad—because Actor Heflin gives a performance well above the usual sagebrush standard.

Four Bags Full (Franco London; Trans-Lux) of black-market pork are lugged across Nazi-held Paris by Jean Gabin and Comedian Bourvil in this delightful shaggy-dog story. That the French can now joke about the German occupation is not surprising. But the movie, winner of France’s “best film” Victoire, explodes with humor, testifying that its makers never stopped laughing up their sleeves when they dared not guffaw outright.

Bourvil, an unbacked Paris hackie, supports himself by odd jobs, including meat-running. A stupid and unimaginative fellow, he enlists the help of Gabin in transporting a freshly slaughtered pig through an obstacle course lined with gendarmes, prostitutes, Nazi soldiers, informers and other keen-nosed dogs. Only the Gallic touch could make such a dangerous journey seem so funny and so sad at the same time. The mishaps that befall the pair have a wonderfully impromptu quality, as if Director Claude Autant-Lara, occasionally glancing at the story (by Marcel Ayme) from which the movie is loosely taken, made up most of the pratfalls and hairbreadth escapes as he went along.

Beneath all the froth is a superb, incisive character study of the two men. Bourvil’s slow mind can concentrate only on moving the meat. But to Gabin, a famous artist mistaken by his dull-witted companion for a house painter, the meat is an abstraction, a philosophical means of testing the cowardice of his countrymen and the wits of his enemies. After slipping their burden past one more peril, Gabin roars with immense self-appreciation: “This pig’s making a genius out of me!” He unsuccessfully tries to persuade Bourvil to hijack their load and be a black-marketeer himself, instead of a mere hauler. Says Gabin: “Then you will be forced to become a boss. See where dishonesty can lead?” Gabin continues to enjoy his larks even after a German patrol catches them in a no-porking zone. But Bourvil, marooned in the smallness of what he is, can only sweat in fear, await the Nazi punishment—and look ahead to a life spent carrying other people’s suitcases.

The Brothers Rico (Columbia) raises the question whether Al Capone (1899-1947) and his era are really dead. Beyond this anachronism, the movie makes a frightening case for the Syndicate, that all-pervasive, omniscient, omnipotent league of organized criminals that appears j to determine ihe main course of U.S. history. Richard Conte, a onetime accountant for one of the Syndicate’s far-flung divisions, is a fool to buck these mighty overlords, but buck them he does, and eventually he learns that he may be Syndicated into oblivion, just as were his two deviationist brothers before him.

This movie is allegedly based on one of the crime yarns of France’s prolific Novelist Georges Simenon. but Producer William Goetz cannot shift the blame that easily. In trying to save his brothers from execution by the boys, Conte learns that the Syndicate is aware of his every movement. Not even Author George Orwell’s Big Brother approached the all-seeing wickedness of the film’s Sid Kubik (Larry Gates). King Cobra of the Underworld. Kubik is so vile a fellow that he even doublecrosses Conte’s mother (Argentina Brunetti), although she once saved his life by stepping between him and an ill-intended slug. Naturally. Villain Kubik gets his in the end. He is much too rotten to survive for nearly as many reels as he does.

The completely unswallowable aspect of this gangbuster nightmare is the single-handed way in which ex-Crook Conte overpowers his alumni association of evil foes. If the Syndicate is as all-powerful as the movie claims, and if Conte can—with a stalwart district attorney’s help —beat it to earth this wrathfully and totally, there is little need for a U.S. defense establishment.