It was an unusual partnership. Angelo had met the old man, Tumbleweed, on the trail after his mule had run off. Helping him get back to his home, the two arrived to find it had been ransacked. Six men rode up then, brothers Tom and Quincy Randall and their men.
That’s when Angelo began to learn the truth. The Randalls had found Tumbleweed’s map, a map of complex directions to a hidden trove of Confederate gold. They didn’t know where to begin. Tumbleweed did, but needed the directions on the map.
A partnership was formed, splitting the take fifty-fifty, half to Angelo and Tunbleweed, half to the Randalls. Of course, Angelo didn’t trust the two brothers.
Things went downhill fast when the Randalls double-crossed them and Angelo ends up pursuing them. Not alone though. He’s saddled with an obstinate Cavalry officer and his troop, not to mention the Colonel’s daughter who slips out after them.
The first hint of trouble came when they found one of the gang staked out and tortured. Apaches had left their mark and it soon became apparent what they wanted.
Outnumbered and with an officer in charge with his own agenda Angelo is determined to get out of this with as many alive as possible.
Or go down trying.
A fine western from Great Britain’s Black Horse western line. For those interested, there is a novella available as an ebook, Angelo and The Strongbox, which is a sort of prequel. I highly recommend both.
Joe Victor(George Raft) wanted to get back into the States and he’d found his ticket. He missed the limelight, the dames, the gambling. A former big time gangster, he’d been deported and lived in Lisbon these days. He gets his way back when he’s hired for a mission in Montreal. We don’t know what that mission is early on and pick up the pieces as the picture moves along. Joey wants to reassemble his old gang, scattered since his deportation, for the job.
One is Joyce Geary(Audrey Totter), now running a Talent agency in Havana. She wants to stay straight, but is forced back into the gang at her old job, being the attraction, distraction, for the target.
Inspector Raoul Leduc(Edward G. Robinson) has three murders in a month on his hands in Montreal. All three are tied together by one innocent bystander: Dr. Carl Macklin(George Dolenz), a nuclear physicist. The first murder is a police constable, bludgeoned to death. Macklin remembers seeing him shortly before his death early one morning. The only other person around then was an organ grinder. When a hair found on the constable comes from a small monkey, that ties in the organ grinder, who happens to turn up dead. The third body is that of Macklin’s secretary, a plain jane young woman who;d been seeing a man on the sly, slipping out on her older sister to meet him. She was found with two bullets in her back. The sister sees the car and the man and when the car, a rental, is found, the fingerprints lead them to a member of Joe Victor’s gang. He becomes the fourth murder, while in a card game.
It seems obvious to Leduc that Macklin is the target. He or something he’s working on. Geary had got something about testing out of him, meeting him at a driving range and pretending ineptitude. But she also begins to fall for the handsome professor and wants nothing of the plot. She’d been straight and was forced to come to Montreal. She plans to send a message to Leduc when she leaves.
They never specify what Macklin is working on. One surmises it’s likely an atomic bomb, but they simply call it the device. The headline on the secretary’s murder calls her “an atomic scientist’s secretary.”
The plan is to get the device and Macklin aboard a freighter headed behind the iron curtain. Leduc is along on the truck taking the device to the testing site, the vehicle is bugged, followed by a fleet of officers, and the real device is not aboard.
The truck is allowed to be taken because Leduc wants the ringleader as well. But they lose the truck anyway, ending up at the harbor, the whole truck, with Leduc and his driver, another cop, in the back, hoisted into the hold.
Where the title comes into place is the end. Joe Victor is a hood, but he’s also an American and a patriot, surprising himself as much as Leduc.
A decent little noir/thriller. Two of the names involved on this one are Daniel Mainwaring(as Geoffrey Holmes) of OUT OF THE PAST(1947) and A. I. Bezzerides who soon after contributed to a better film, KISS ME DEADLY(1955).
It was an unusual partnership. Angelo had met the old man, Tumbleweed, on the trail after his mule had run off. Helping him get back to his home, the two arrived to find it had been ransacked. Six men rode up then, brothers Tom and Quincy Randall and their men.
