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Mar 27, 2015 Web Exclusive By Austin Trunick

Just two years after the War, a former G.I. named Gagin (Robert Montgomery, who also directs) arrives by Greyhound to the sleepy New Mexican city of San Pablo. In his briefcase he carries a service revolver and a canceled check; he’s come to town to seek revenge on mob boss Frank Hugo for his involvement in the death of a war buddy. In over his head but no less determined, Gagin moves forward with his plan to blackmail the dangerous mobster. Along the way, he gets help from two locals: a boisterous merry-go-round operator named Pancho (Thomas Gomez), and Pila (Wanda Hendrix), a teenage Native American girl.

“You don’t know dames. You don’t know what they’re like! They like to get their hooks into ya.”

Scholar Imogen Sara Smith, in her included video essay, describes Ride the Pink Horse as an anti-noir. Indeed, its idiosyncrasies in tone make it less bleak than your typical noir picture of the period. Montgomery himself isn’t quite the hard-nosed tough-guy one usually encounters; he wears the right suit and carries a gun, but he’s ill-suited to his task, arriving in San Pablo without much of a plan. He’s not a detective or a crook—he’s a disenchanted WWII vet with a half-boiled revenge plot, and he’d be absolutely hopeless without the help of the resourceful Pila or Pancho’s warm generosity. There’s a lot of humor in the film, coming mostly at the courtesy of those two characters: Pancho’s friendly drunkenness, or Pila’s inability to comprehend Gagin’s incessant barbs. Yes, the two are portrayed as stereotypes—in typical, early Hollywood fashion, Hendrix was a Welsh-Irish girl from Florida playing a Native American—but, as Imogen Sara Smith points out in her essay, they’re at least positive stereotypes, painted as morally superior to the film’s mostly-crooked Caucasian characters.

Criterion’s Blu-ray transfer offers up a very nice transfer of Russell Metty’s sharp black-and-white photography. (Metty would go on to do Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, one of noir’s best-shot pictures.) The extra features include a commentary by genre scholars Alain Silver and James Ursini and the aforementioned video essay from Smith. Also included is a radio adaptation of the film from 1947, in which Montgomery, Hendrix, and Gomez reprise their roles. (It’s a truncated adaptation with intact sponsor ads, similar to the one included on their release of Palm Beach Story.) Overall it’s a handsome package for an under-seen but highly-recommended film.

www.criterion.com/films/28066-ride-the-pink-horse

Author rating: 7/10