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potfilms
Reviews
Plunder Road (1957)
Code and precedent.
Enjoyable B movie, nicely shot in black and white and "Regalscope".
Wonder if the writers had seen the 1951 British comedy THE LAVENDER HILL MOB which had a similar solution for smuggling gold bullion as the last car in this? It is always a little dispiriting to know in advance with crime thrillers in this Production Code Enforcement era, that no matter how clever the crooks or plotting, they won't get away with it, and there will be a shift in sympathy away from the criminals at some point (the gratuitous murder of the garage owner.) Hubert Cornfield went on th o make some more interesting movies including PRESSURE POINT and NIGHT OF THE FOLLOWING DAY with Marlon Brando.
The Bachelor Father (1931)
A Pre-coder with some interference?
Attracted to this by discovering the free and easy joys of Pre-code, which I take to be up to 1934, movies, I was surprised by some clumsily handled late information inserted into the film; For the entire film there has been the breezy exposition that Sir Basil (C. Aubrey Smith) has had a widely travelled early life and fathered children all over with women he seems to barely remember in most cases, referring to a log book of his conquests. He is a BACHELOR FATHER! Everyone, included his rediscovered grown-up children seem to accept this without judgment.
Then late in the piece Sir Basil is meeting with his lawyer and there is a mumbled exchange about documents and Sir basil refers to 'the fourth divorce'. So, we are suddenly meant to say to ourselves "oh, he was married all the times of these offspring's!" This is quite jarring to the spirit of the film and seems like the type of compromise forced into scripts after the full enforcement of the Production Code in later years.
I'd be curious to learn whether this information was in the original play.