Cinema: Disaster on a Low Budget

Ring of Fire (M-G-M). “Maybe I can give you a lift,” suggests Iaconic David (TV’s Richard Diamond) Janssen, the deputy sheriff of a small Oregon town.

“Where?” flips bosomy Joyce Taylor (Atlantis, The Lost Continent), jeans tight about her hips, man’s shirt open to the navel. “To the nearest motel?” But Joyce is more than a kidder; she packs a mean pistol, which she has used to hold up a gas station and steal a car. At the village drugstore, Dave separates her from her banana split, shoves her and two sinister cronies into a squad car and heads toward headquarters.

En route, using the ersatz crime lingo favored throughout the movie, Joyce says: “It was a cinch the pump jockey’d give you fuzz an eyeball description of the wagon,” meaning that the filling-station attendant was certain to give the cops a full description of the stolen car. Pretty soon, as the script commands, she “tantalizingly presses her body against the deputy’s and eases his own gun from its holster. The movement of her shirt rubbing against him opens the front revealingly.” “See?” she asks tauntingly. “You should’ve searched me. You kinda missed something, didn’t you, copper?” The movie thus plants itself squarely in the category of the big leer (TIME, June 9).

But at least the cheapie production team of Andrew and Virginia Stone (Cry Terror) keeps a hot tempo. After junking the car, the four sprint through a “dense and umbrageous forest” of Douglas fir, and the sheriff’s gun changes hands at least three more times. One hood tumbles to his death from a scenic precipice; the steely moll turns to mush under Janssen’s Gableish charms; the other hood, played by Actor-Comic Frank (Bells Are Ringing) Gorshin, gets his in a forest fire.

The Stones, who go in for big disasters (they bought and sank the old Ile de France to make The Last Voyage), also record the panic of an entire town, collapse a real train and a real timber trestle “420 ft. long and 200 ft. high.” Yet, disappointingly, the actual sounds of collapse were so implausible that the moviemakers had to resort to studio fabrication, recording the noise of a bent spike being pulled out of a thick board with a crowbar and replaying the sound in an echo chamber at one-third its normal speed. Like the movie itself, it was simple, effective and cheap.