seymourblack-1 Robert Montgomery directs and stars in this offbeat crime drama about an embittered ex-GI who attempts to avenge the death of his wartime buddy by blackmailing his buddy's killer. As the killer is a wealthy, ruthless and very powerful mob boss, the road to revenge proves to be very challenging but more surprisingly, it also proves to be a transformative experience for the would-be blackmailer as well as a route to his own redemption.World War 11 veteran Lucky Gagin (Robert Montgomery) arrives in a small New Mexican town with a pistol and a bank cheque in his possession. After putting the cheque into a locker in San Pablo's bus depot, he sets off in search of somewhere to stay and after asking a group of young girls for directions, is led to the La Fonda Hotel by a young Native American girl called Pila (Wanda Hendrix). She insists on giving him a good luck charm which she says will protect him and despite his obvious cynicism, Gagin, who is rather disconcerted by the girl's fixed gaze, keeps the gift and soon goes on to discover that all of the local hotels are full because of the number of visitors who are in town for the annual fiesta.Gagin had come to San Pablo to blackmail the man he knew was responsible for killing his wartime buddy, Shorty Thompson. The man in question is Frank Hugo (Fred Clark), a mobster and fugitive from the American authorities and the bank cheque that Gagin has in his possession constitutes evidence that during his activities as a War profiteer, Hugo had bribed a high-ranking government official.Gagin visits Hugo's room at the La Fonda Hotel, but after assaulting the mobster's male secretary and meeting his devious moll, discovers that an early meeting won't be possible. After leaving Hugo's room, Gagin is approached by an FBI Agent called Bill Retz (Art Smith) who has been pursuing Hugo for some time and knows exactly what Gagin's got in mind. He tries to deter Gagin from going through with his plan and asks him for the evidence he's got, which could be used to bring Hugo to justice. Gagin refuses to co-operate and later goes to the "Cantina de las Tres Violetas" where he meets the jovial and very friendly Pancho (Thomas Gomez) who generously offers him somewhere to sleep for the night. Pancho is the proprietor of the town's carousel and the accommodation that the two men share for the night is his open- fronted shelter close-by.When Gagin gets the opportunity to demand $30,000 from Hugo for the incriminating cheque, the partially deaf criminal arranges to meet him at the Tip Top Cafe to do the deal. However, a double-cross follows when Gagin is attacked and stabbed by a couple of Hugo's thugs. Although he kills one of his attackers and seriously wounds the other, Gagin is very badly injured and is later found by Pila who had constantly been following him. Pila and Pancho then nurse him until he determinedly decides to confront Hugo again. What happens on this occasion turns out to be surprising to everyone concerned and contributes to Gagin's life taking a different and better course than he could possibly have expected.What Gagin had experienced during his military service had left him deeply disillusioned and angry and resulted in him becoming the extremely unpleasant individual that he was when he arrived in San Pablo. The friendship and loyalty that were extended to him by Pila and Pancho came as a huge surprise to him especially as neither of these impoverished individuals had anything to gain from their actions and, in fact, both suffered beatings to protect him. This experience and the unexpected way in which his efforts to blackmail Hugo ended, resulted in him leaving San Pablo as a significantly changed man.Robert Montgomery's directorial style is very accomplished and his use of a long single take early on in the action has the effect of grabbing and holding his audience's attention extremely successfully. The way in which another sequence is shot when Pancho is brutally beaten in front of some very distressed children on the carousel is also highly effective and makes a great impact.With its unusual story, sharp dialogue and consistently strong performances, this movie is highly successful in being entertaining and also in making some salient points at the same time.

treywillwest As the Criterion commentator says, this is kind of an anti-Noir. It follows a criminal low-life intent on revenge of a sort on one of his kind. To get what he wants, he resorts to all manner of masculine clichés of hardness as he tracks his prey to a Mexican border town. But rather than finding success, or destruction, (two opposing forms of affirmation) through this brutishness, the tough is instead emasculated, made helpless and irrelevant to the narrative that supposedly revolves around him. The traditional noir anti-hero, rather like the classical Tragic Hero, is both empowered and doomed by his capacity for violence. Here, the anti-hero is saved by his inability to determine his own fate. Instead, an alien and indifferent culture chooses to save him, simply as an act of good will, or, as it amounts to the same thing, for the cheap thrill of doing so. The Noir Anti-Hero, like the Tragic Hero, becomes the pinnacle of the (doomed) world but cannot escape the horrible fate that world has in store for its subject. This movie's protagonist escapes this fate by becoming irrelevant to the space of its narrative world.

chaos-rampant 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.

e-harding I was in the process of reading this book and then started watching a movie without knowing what the movie was. It was deja vu all of the sudden. It turned out to be this movie. I think that Robert Montgomery did a great job of capturing the character that was in the book. Tough but naive at the same time. A very good noir film that should get more play and recognition.The dark atmosphere,the craziness of the music and the partying in the background all the time as the story unfolds. Maybe I had a leg up reading the book almost first. It's very rare when I think a movie based on a book is just as good as the book. I felt sympathy for Robert Montgomery's character. All the time thinking he was going to lose to the cheats. He had his own principals and stuck to them.Can't say enough.Good movie.