Trois pas au Nord

A Dark-Atmosphere and Tone Pervades this Picture Shot in Italy by B-Movie Maker Wilder.

A Good Story of Ex-Con-Ex-Army Black Marketeer Bridges Returning After Serving 4 Years in the Brig.

He Buried the Loot Before Being Caught and He's Back for the Digs.

The Movie is Dominated by the Only American in the Movie as He is quite a Contrast.

Handsome, Tall, and Blonde Among Backward, Groveling Poor-Folk.

All Hemmed in by a Police-State and Criminals Constantly on the Move and Surveillance is the State of Play.

Bridges' Confidence Propels Him as He Searches for Clues to His Missing Money.

It's a Good Mystery Story from Wilder and He Keeps Things Going with Great Natural Locations and Dark Figures Lurking About.

Would be Better with Subtitles, a Lot of Foreign Language is Spoken.

The Film is Obviously an Homage/Rip-Off of "The Third Man" (1949).

Complete with "Guitar" Plucking Soundtrack.

It's a Hard-Boiled Noir with Sentimental Touches

A Bit Different because of the Locations and the Foreign Cast makes it a Euro-Look-See in the Post-War Era.

Good Atmospherics and the Foreign Cast and Locations make it...

Worth a Watch.

Director Lee Wilder - a complete unknown to me - had a potentially very gripping plot to work with, but failed on various fronts: cinematography, albeit keeping to the film noir tenets of darkness, is unremittingly dark throughout, consistently filmed at night or in the darkest parts of Amalfi, Italy.

Ex-GI Frank Keeler (Bridges) returns to Italy after doing 4 years in the clinker in Detroit, USA, to pay for his involvement in black market activity. Sensing that he was about to get caught, he had the good sense to bury the proceeds in a box by a cemetery.

However, all types of complications happen from that point on, and Lee Wilder simply cannot get believable performances from his cast, including noted Italian actors like Aldo Fabrizi, Lea Padovani (she sounds completely unnatural in English, but quite convincing in Italian) and Gianni Rizzo, among others.

Lloyd Bridges emerges as the least bad of the lot but still not good enough to convince me ever to rewatch THREE STEPS NORTH. 6/10.

Produced and directed by W. Lee Wilder, this Italian production stars Lloyd Bridges as a GI who returns to Italy after the war to find some money he stashed a few years earlier (I don't want to give away too much of the plot, so I'll be intentionally vague)--needless to say, he has a number of problems in getting to it and a number of other people manage to get in the way of his getting it. Lea Padovani is the lovely but fiery lady he knew during the war who he tries to find to assist him, and the colorful Aldo Fabrizi is a man who lives right next to where the money was stashed and who befriends Bridges, but who Bridges must keep in the dark about his REAL reasons for being in the area. As always, Lloyd Bridges manages to make the character richly detailed and full, giving him some unpleasant qualities even though he is the "hero" of the piece, and making us feel for him as he faces danger and encounters one problem after another. The ending is nicely ironic while being positive and bringing the character to a new level of self-awareness. Wilder uses a number of nice, unexpected touches throughout and the location filming and mostly-Italian cast (except for two small supporting characters who play Americans)give the film a unique flavor. This originally received a US release through United Artists and was taped off TV during the early days of cable, when stations had a lot of time to fill and still played off-the-wall black-and-white B movies that could be gotten cheaply. Those days are long gone, but you should still keep your eyes out for this distinctive mystery with a fine Lloyd Bridges performance.

Lloyd Bridges returns to Amalfi. He was stationed there during the war in the Quartermaster Corps; then he was in prison for stealing. Now he's out with a dishonorable discharge, and looking for the loot he buried. Things get in his way: not only his old girlfriend, Lea Padovani, but the money is missing, and the fellow who has been spending freely is dead, and Bridges is a suspect.

The two leads keep up the pace of dialogue and performance, and there are some lovely shots of Amalfi, but there's a leaden pace to the rest of it, raising my hackles in a get-on-with-it way as the police get involved, and apparently random strangers. Clearly this is an attempt to tangle the mystery, to offer more suspects, but director W. Lee Wilder and editor Ruth Totz seem content to let scenes ramble on without much happening.

Where the movie really succeeds is as a character study. Bridges' ex-army man Frank Keeler comes across as unusually unsympathetic. We see him first as a penny-ante black- marketeer. Then, after serving a term in the brig, he cadges money from his buddies, but runs out on the debt. And if that's not bad enough, we discover he ran out on his Italian girlfriend and now, back in Italy, wants to use her again. Yeah, he's something of a rat, and only returns to Italy to dig up his buried army loot. Bridges is excellent, with an appropriate swagger and cocky self-assurance. And we don't so much root for him as wait to see what happens next.

Filmed on location in Italy, the authentic background helps overcome a rather muddled plot, especially the murky intrigue with American gangster Conway. What's really apparent, however, is the influence of Orson Welles' The Third Man (1950) from the previous year. Here, director-producer Wilder emulates much of Welles' complex visual style in a story that also resembles Welles' tale of post-war European intrigue, even down to the guitar accompaniment in place of the highly popular zither of The Third Man. Nothing necessarily wrong with this, except Welles is a really tough act to follow.

Anyway, It's an appropriate ending that achieves some poignancy without betraying Frank's selfish character; thanks also to Aldo Fabrizi's sly performance as the wily caretaker. All in all, it's an obscure movie, likely because of the absence of big name stars. Nonetheless, Bridges shows here how much talent there is outside those big name stars.