A Brilliant Conflict

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

A thoroughly unpleasant Robert Montgomery (Gagin) arrives in a Mexican town to exact revenge on criminal Fred Clark (Hugo) who is responsible for the killing of his army pal. Also on the tail of Clark is diminutive Government Agent Art Smith (Retz). Local girl Wanda Hendrix (Pila) develops a creepy fascination with Montgomery and follows him around for the duration of the film. God knows why. He is horrible to her. And to everyone else. He needs to be bumped off. Is there hope?This film is boring. The story is a little confusing in relation to the cheque plot line and only the character of Andrea King (Marjorie) convinces. Art Smith is nice enough but no way would he be in such control of a situation as he is when he enters the gangster's hotel room at the end of the film. Thomas Gomez (Pancho) is good enough as the Mexican owner of the roundabout but I was surprised to learn that he was nominated for a best supporting actor award. Why? He was a stereotypical fat, jolly Mexican whose behaviour made no sense at all from the very beginning when he befriended the impossibly unlike-able Montgomery. Montgomery is just plain awful in this and his mouth when he laughs betrays him as slightly retarded looking. He also gets the better hand in a fight against two hardened cut-throat Mexican gangsters – NO WAY! Montgomery wanders around in this film for great long, boring sections and elicits no sympathy whatsoever. This film is not good. And what is the title about? The ending does score the film a point for being different but stronger lead performances could have made this far more effective.

In the border town of San Pablo, preparing for an annual 'Mexican Fiesta,' arrives Gagin (Robert Montgomery): tough, mysterious and laconic. His mission: to find the equally mysterious Frank Hugo (Fred Clark), evidently for revenge; or is it blackmail? This film gets credit for being a film noir set not in a big city or in some dark alley, but in a smaller southwestern town. And yet, despite the setting, it is firmly in the film noir genre and not in the western genre. Quite impressive.The story itself is pretty simple, but the characters are what make it great. Gagin is awesome, as is Hugo, but it is the FBI agent who makes it complete: cat versus mouse, or is it? Throw in the local peasant girl, and you have a well-rounded cast of characters.

Weird, off-beat, and dark even by noir standards, RIDE THE PINK HORSE is the definite cultish item, a film of some other order that happens the way it does either by accident/inexperience on the filmmaker's part or from some kind of intuitive design, a basic way of saying "everyone makes films this way but what if I take out these little parts and see how it works". Knowing that Robert Montgomery helmed LADY IN THE LAKE, a Raymond Chandler adaptation shot entirely from Marlowe's POV seemingly for novelty's sake, doing something for the simple pleasure of finding out how it turns out, I'm inclined to think it's the second, with the first factoring somewhere in the process. For all Montgomery knew the result could've been a muddled incoherent mess. But it's not.For some reason, it's mysterious and elusive, oddly captivating and dreamlike even when it doesn't make a whole lot of sense (or perhaps because of it), because the characters are left incomplete and indecipherable, the way real people are most of the time, doing what they do out of some sense of personal obligation or skewed honor they can't even explain to themselves. Hollywood usually explains that motivation and in doing so turnes characters into plot devices created to move the story forward or halt it long enough for the necessary exposition to fill the gaps. Montgomery instead opens the film with his protagonist, a disillusioned former GI turned blackmailer, wandering around in a small New Mexican town the day before a fiesta and doesn't bother explaining why's there or what's he there to do until we're a good 20 minutes in.In the meantime, the movie has soaked up enough eerie smalltown atmosphere and a sense of impending doom, grinning Mexicans giving the protagonist false directions to his hotel and a weird wideyed girl giving him strange charms to ward off bad luck, that when the plot kicks into motion we've established so much mood that the story need not be anything more than a basic skeleton. The second half is not as great as the first because the potboilerish noir aspects take hold, something about a typical blackmail scheme and characters trying to outwit and deceive each other as they're wont to do when the film noir is their natural habitat while a government agent stalks in the perimeters trying to arrest the victim of the blackmail for the same crime he's being blackmailed, but thankfully it's not for too long.Soon we get dingy Mexican taverns and the fiesta pouring through the streets and a crane shot that rises to meet the ghastly Zozobra figure towering above the town; we get a great set piece in a merry-go-round from which the movie takes its bizarre title, stabbings in the back of restaurants, our knifed protagonist staggering in the dark around town automaton-like to god knows where, the government agent showing up at just the right time to bail him out or tell him things he needs to be wary off like a deus ex machina or a Campbellian mentor, rumbling monologues against flag-waving and working 9 to 5 that reveal a movie as disillusioned with the postwar American dream as its own characters, all these wrapped in a structure that has an odd mystical/mythic quality about it.And of course, we get Pancho, the merry-go-round owner, and his pearls of wisdom such as "when you're young, everyone sticks knife in you" (which I remember someone had as his sig here). A true delight for the cult movie aficionado and the film noir fan who always cared more for BLAST OF SILENCE than THE MALTESE FALCON. Great stuff.

I saw this film when I was a young boy when it first came out in 1947 but didn't truly appreciate it till I saw it on TCM the other night again. I agree with all your commentators as to its enigmatic mystery and its possible shortfalls attributable to Montgomery vis a vis Bogart. I found the dialogue and the monologues gripping. In later looking this movie up here I discovered why: the script was by Ben Hecht (of Front Page fame). No wonder it was so great. As many of your commentators point out (and very perceptively too) the individual performances of Gomez, Hendrix, Clark, etc. were all splendid, not to forget Montgomery himself. But TCM must have edited the film or else I fell asleep watching it: I definitely did not see Gomez being beaten up by anyone while being watched by uncomprehending children. That part was definitely not in the version that I watched, sad to say. One of the strongest parts of the film was the disillusionment and cynicism expressed by the Montgomery character against patriotism, and WWII and its profiteers in typical film-noir fashion. Also strikingly evocative and disturbing was the final scene in which the innocent-appearing and passive Hendrix character finally opens up to her friends and re-enacts the events of the film in a vivacious and cynical way to show her friends how sophisticated she is after all. What a dash of cold water in the face of those who expected a romantic ending between two such repressed characters who made a specialty out of never showing their emotions. A great, great movie.