Plunder of the Sun

Glenn Ford and Sean McClory in Plunder of the Sun (dir. John Farrow, 1953).

I rented this after reading the novel by David Dodge, which was re-released recently as one of the monthly editions in the Hard Case Crime paperback series. It's pretty faithful, and captures Dodge's breathless travel-adventure flavor, even if the budget apparently limited the beautiful location shooting to Havana and Oaxaca, and not the book's third major locale of Peru and Lake Titicaca.

All the elements of a classic are here: Ford is great, Sean McClory makes a villain worthy of Orson Welles, and the camera work, as I said, is often breathtaking. What's missing? I don't know, gravitas or something. Not that the novel has any, either. Good fun, in any case.