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Having acquired the DVD from San Diego City Library my quest to watch every movie in the compilation comedy Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid begins with the lowest scoring movie, 1949’s The Bribe, starring Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Charles Laughton, and Vincent Price.
MGM
Federal Agent Rigby (Taylor) is sent far from any US jurisdiction to a small island off Central America and the fishing hamlet of Carlotta to investigate a criminal ring smuggling war surplus aircraft engines onto the international black market. Had the feature opened this way it might have been a better movie, instead it begins with the most tired of film noir tropes, particularly when done badly, the voice-over. To make this overused technique even less appealing the voice-over is spoken in second person. So, everything we see Rigby narrating that he did he describes ‘you’ did. I myself have never found a piece of fiction where the second person works, it always keeps me at a distance, unable to submerge myself in the story being told, either in prose or in cinema.
Anyway, Rigby finds the married couple that the fed believe are running the smuggling operation, Elizabeth (Gardner) a nightclub singer and Hinton (John Hodiak) her drunkard of a husband. Naturally, Rigby falls for Elizabeth and she for him though the production code keeps their mutual feelings chaste. Rigby’s cover as someone simply looking for sport fishing had apparently the half-life of one of James Bond’s covers and he is approached by Bealer (Laughton) who offers him a bribe of 10,000 dollars to simply leave the island. The real bribe of the title however, is the threat to drag Elizabeth down with the criminals when she had actually been ignorant of it all unless Rigby ‘plays ball.’
At one point the movie makes extensive use of rear-screen projection so performers on a boat set might appear to be out on the open sea, marlin fishing. While this technique may have been acceptable to audiences of the 40s and 50s to modern eyes it screams its tricks like a poor stage magician. Which is a shame as the sequence boasts what in better handled hands could have been a tense and dynamic scene of attempted assassination.
There are no real surprises, or twisty plot reveals and if The Bribe didn’t boast a cast of well-established stars by 1949’s reckoning, it would be an adequate ‘B-Picture.’ The only real standout moment in the movie is the final chase when Rigby pursues the ringleader Carwood (Price) through a festival and into a massive ground-level firework display. Some shots are clearly the leads, Taylor and Price, dashing through exploding fireworks and others are stunt performers with their features well hidden. Elements of this climax were used in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid and are what intrigued me the most, igniting my curiosity to see just how and why such a scene occurred.
The DVD is going back to the library and while The Bribe made for a passable lunch time viewing it is not a noir that is going to live for very long in my head or my heart.
