To me, this movie is perfection.

Beautiful, moving film.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

It's the stars that make this film watchable: Alan Ladd and Gail Russell.The story is OK but these days with all the brilliant crime/mystery movies and series on TV and cable, "Calcutta" comes across as pretty lightweight.A couple of pilots, Neale Gordon and Pedro Blake played by Alan Ladd and William Bendix, who fly cargo over the mountains between Burma and India just after WW2, investigate the murder of fellow pilot Bill Cunningham.Neale Gordon is suspicious of the motives of women young and old, but falls for his dead friend's fiancé, Virginia Moore (Gail Russell), while keeping his former romantic interest, Marina Tanev (June Duprez), on hold. After a lot of punching and some surprising slapping around of Miss Moore, things get sorted out.The film was set in a fairly convincing backlot Calcutta, but it could have been set just about anywhere. The strongest influence on the film seems to be "The Maltese Falcon", especially the ending. In fact, Edith King as Jewellery dealer Mrs King is somewhat of a Sydney Greenstreet character.I must admit I am still an Alan Ladd fan dating from many a Saturday matinée back in the 1950s. He had a quiet confidence that projected strength, and although this film is a bit blah, he carries the picture. Apparently he was one of the genuine nice guys and loyal; more than a couple of people always got work on his films, but he was also a tragic figure - gone too early aged 50.But there is an even more tragic star in this film, Gail Russell, who died aged only 36. This was fairly early in her career and critics at the time thought she was miscast. However that sense of hesitancy and innocence was fine for the role even though her performance was pieced together from short takes; she was so nervous she could hardly get her lines out. In a recent biography by Steven Glenn Ochoa, "Fallen Star", he tells how she had a nervous habit of ringing her hands, which directors tried to stop, but it's obvious in one of her early scenes in the film. Ladd was very good with her on set but not everyone was like that in her career.It's these two charismatic stars and their unique screen presence that still makes "Calcutta" worth a look.

The team of Alan Ladd and William Bendix, as good friends off the screen as is shown on the screen in Calcutta, is the only real reason to watch this potboiler of an adventure story. The version I saw had several minutes cut out of it that were crucial to the plot.Ladd and Bendix play a pair of pilots ferrying cargo and passengers from Chungking to Calcutta and back over the 'Hump' which is what the pilots in wartime called the Himalayas. The native people there more picturesquely called the mountain range, 'the roof of the world'. It was a dangerous run and these guys decided to keep doing it and make some money after World War II. You can see the flag of Nationalist Kuomintang China on their flight jackets.Anyway a third buddy of there's John Whitney greets them in Calcutta after a dangerous run in which cargo had to be dumped and announces he's getting married. Ladd who has a loose relationship with June Duprez, and Bendix both don't think terribly much of the idea, but congratulate him anyway.The next day Whitney is strangled in the streets of Calcutta and Ladd and Bendix like in The Blue Dahlia the previous year are on the trail of the culprit. The first stop is Whitney's fiancé, pretty Gail Russell, who knows a lot more than she's telling. Let's just say that a whole lot of pilots are being made out to be saps.Tremendous events were going in both India and China at the time that Paramount was making Calcutta on their sound-stage yet from the story you would never know it. No hint at all is made about the Communist insurgency in China and in India you would think the British Raj was going to last another hundred years. Not one word about it in this potboiler of a plot which the Films of Alan Ladd says resembles Terry And The Pirates.Probably Calcutta would have been a lot better had we seen more of Bendix in the film. That's always good for any picture. However he gets to try and earn a living for the two of them while Ladd stays in Calcutta to solve the mystery. However it's Bendix who hears something from merchant Paul Singh that he tells Ladd about that starts the whole thing to unravel. Later on Bendix runs some interference with the British police that allows Ladd to stay free and solve the case.Calcutta is so typical of the potboiler films Ladd did and carried on the strength of his personality. It hasn't much else to recommend it.

I like Alan Ladd but this is one of his weakest films. No plot. No excitement. Gail Russell is attractive but couldn't act if her life depended on it. She has the same facial expression throughout the film regardless of the scene. When she's told her fiancé has been murdered-no expression. When she's making out with Alan Ladd- no expression. If only Veronica Lake had been available. Ladd is always good. This was still at a time when they had him take off his shirt in every movie. And the Calcutta we see is entity on the Paramount backlot. Maybe with some decent writing, some villains, maybe a plot, this could have been something Quite a bore.

Calcutta is far from Alan Ladd's finest hour on the silver screen (nor director John Farrow's, for that matter). His trademark contempt for women and his android-like affect prove unappealing and tedious when not undercut by plausible psychology or fleshed-out co-stars. Here he has nothing but a murky Asian hodgepodge of noir cliches to wade through, the inevitable William Bendix at his side (and, this time, on his side). Trying to solve the murder of a fellow trunk-line pilot working the route from India to China, he drifts from hotel to casino to airfield encountering a rogues' gallery of grotesques. Edith King, as a stogie-puffing Baby Jane Hudson, promises more than she delivers; Gail Russell, the black widow of the piece, is kind of like Mary Astor to three parts water. This is one film from the noir cycle whose obscurity gives little cause for regret.