Great Film overall

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

ROADBLOCK is a film noir B-movie that borrows a lot of the plotting and situations from the likes of genre classics such as DOUBLE INDEMNITY. The story involves a crooked insurance investigator who finds himself falling in love with a classic femme fatale. She's not interested in him, so he turns to robbery in order to facilitate her advances, but of course it all ends in tears. Doesn't it always? ROADBLOCK is a workable B-movie but it's fair to say that the storyline is overly familiar and the execution is hardly the stuff of greatness. Charles McGraw is a dependable leading man type figure, but he carries little of the conviction or charisma of the likes of Robert Mitchum or Robert Ryan. Joan Dixon is better as the alluring love interest, but her character is rather sharply drawn and I can't help but feel more melodrama could have been made of the premise. As it stands, it's only at the high-speed climax where things start to get interesting.

A Film-Noir That Seems at Times Constructed with a Bit of an Awkward Composite. Charles McGraw is Cast Against Type as a Romantic and Joan Dixon's Femme Fatale is Written with an Abrupt Change of Character.Nicholas Muscara is Behind the Camera but it's Not His A-Game. However, Despite the Film's Inconsistent Flavor it Manages to be a Very Watchable Example, if Not a Pristine Example of the Genre.The Theme is Noir For Sure. A Downward Spiral of a Good Man Gone Bad by an Infatuation with a Glamorous Girl's Temptive Allure. By the Time She has a Change of Heart, the Damage is Done and there is No Turning Back. That Aids the Cautionary Tale of Life's Many Roads to Take and Be Careful of the Detours.Overall, a Good Example of the Genre but Perhaps Not the Best. McGraw and Dixon are Fine and the Story is Typical, but the Movie Lacks Style and is Pedestrian in the Way it is Cobbled Together. It Seems Inattentive at Times with a Distinct Aloff Concern for the Weight of the Material.Still, it has Enough Going for it to Recommend and is Not Fully a Disappointment, Just Given a Little More Concern for the Film as a Whole it Remains Competent and a Contender, but Not that of a Champion.

Do not watch this with anyone you care about. Some movies are good. Some are bad, but among them you can often weave an interesting overlay if you are with someone who can help.But the thing has to give some basic material to work with. Cheap production and bad acting can easily be overcome, but a weak world is insurmountable. Usually, these things inherit a world from noir. That's a world rich in capricious ironies that the slightest nod can activate.This is advertised as noir, and it is as far from that as it can get. With noir, this happen to people as if the gods were playing games and arranging odd circumstances. In this story, a few people simply make mistakes that lead to their downfall.There's some promise in the setup: a floosie pretends to be a man's wife (in order to get a cheap ticket) and ends up as his wife. In between, she was a gangster's whore. The new husband is one of those pseudo-cops the movies invented in the form of "insurance investigators," and he wants to treat his (now reformed) wife to riches. So he teams with the gangster.That's a pretty strong setup, including our hubby as part of the investigative team. Butthis description is twice as interesting as the movie.Ted's Evaluation: 1 of 3 -- You can probably find something better to with this part of your life.

This film contains one film's most intriguing ideas: whether an honest man whose life and career are built around law-enforcement would throw away all his principles for love? Unfortunately, this film doesn't quite become good enough to make us care about this question.Joe Peters (played by Charles McGraw) is an insurance investigator. He and his partner Harry Miller (played by redoubtable character actor Louis Jean Heydt) are the best in the business. The film opens with them springing an elaborate but ingenious trap on a bank robber in order to trick the thief into revealing where he hid his stash. It's a well-written, well-acted, surprising opening scene and raises the viewer's expectations for the film.Sadly, these expectations are not met. Peters is detailed to get the money back to Los Angeles (although why they simply would not deposit the cash in a bank and have the funds wired to L.A. seems not to have occurred to the men). On the way, Peters runs into a woman, Diane (played with a sort of bored iciness by Joan Dixon), who pretends to be Peters' wife in order to con the airline into giving her a half-price ticket to L.A.One of the most important obstacles to overcome in a film like this is the viewer's disinclination to believe that the insurance investigator is as honest, principled and dedicated as he must be in order for his later moral fall to be believable and interesting. Unfortunately, "Roadblock" never tries to overcome this hurdle. Poor Peters immediately falls for the greedy, icy, selfish Diane -- although why is never made clear (Dixon's portrayal makes Diane completely unsympathetic, which in turns leads the viewer to be suspicious of Peters' sudden love for her). It is completely out of character. Had the film set up Peters' character better -- perhaps by giving us glimpses of how emotionally empty he was feeling, or perhaps by having him confront his loneliness -- "Roadblock" would have been a better picture.From this point on, however, "Roadblock" is simply a standard crime film. It cannot really be considered film noir, as it does not try to explore any of the seediness of the criminal world or give us insight into the "reality" of crime. In fact, the main criminal -- Kendall Webb, played by Lowell Gilmore as if he were sleepwalking through the role -- is a playboy with a wife in a penthouse in Vegas.Once Peters makes the decision to try to woo Diane (who refuses to marry for love, only money) by helping Webb knock over a bank and escape the clutches of the law (which, by the way, is seemingly non-existent in the world created by "Roadblock's" writers) and the insurance company (one wonders why the FDIC is never mentioned, although it existed at the time this film was made), the only thing worth paying attention to is the actual plotting and crime itself. I have to admit that this is a tightly-written little crime drama, with a believable heist that is well executed by the thieves and which unravels (as it must) due to solid detective work rather than chance and coincidence (as in so many lesser films).But the heart of the film -- Peters' moral collapse, the effect this has on his personality (he becomes angry at work, which is a plot element stolen from "Double Indemnity") and marriage to Diane, and the lengths to which he goes to keep his ill-gotten gains (and hence Diane) -- are not nearly as well-written or acted. Charles McGraw (who had a long and fairly illustrious career as a character actor) turns in a good performance as Peters. His desperation and agony over the though of losing Diane is palpable and subtlely acted, and he has a terrific way of acting with his face (check out the scene where he stages Webb's murder and has to watch the body burn) that really helps lift the film from C-grad to B-grade. But it's not enough to overcome the stolid acting by Dixon and Gilmore.The film's terribly predictable ending -- the bad guys get their comeuppance, the woman abandons her greed and falls in love, the best friend is betrayed, etc. -- doesn't help, either. There's nothing special about Nicholas Musuraca's cinematography, except for the obsessiveness with medium shots -- and it is nowhere near as inspired as his work on "The Magnificent Ambersons," "Deadline at Dawn," or "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer." Another 45 minutes of character development at the front of the film would have helped set up Peters much better and given us more interest in the character of Diane.