The Money Trap

Lionel White's novel becomes an adequate time-filler from rote director Burt Kennedy. Big city cop Glenn Ford, anxious to hold on to luscious wife Elke Sommer, turns to crime; his partner of six years, Ricardo Montalban, wants in on the action. Familiar swindling and safe-cracking yarn goosed by Hal Schaefer's beatnik music, Paul Vogel's gorgeously bleak black-and-white cinematography, and interesting performances from an agreeable cast. Glenn Ford doesn't try hard to flesh out this complicated character, yet his smaller moments (like stroking Sommer's forearm in bed) go a long way to making a connection with the audience; Rita Hayworth (despite a corny send-off) is excellent as an alcoholic, and Montalban simmers with cat-like heat and paranoia. The dialogue is amusingly gritty ("I'm worried!" ... "Then worry with your mouth shut!") and the locales are vividly captured, however the M-G-M studio streets and back alleys look as phony as ever. **1/2 from ****

Glenn Ford and Ricardo Montalban are good policemen gone bad who fall into "The Money Trap," a 1965 noir directed by Burt Kennedy. Ford plays Joe Baron, married to beautiful Lisa (Elke Sommer) who is no longer getting dividends from her father's company. Downsizing and some yard sales would seem to be in order, but instead, Joe has his eye on a mob doctor's (Joseph Cotten) safe that's filled with money. Montalban, as his partner Pete, wants in. One man has already been killed cracking the safe, and there are some surprises in store.

This film is just okay, kind of depressing, but it's notable for the performance of Rita Hayworth as the widow of the dead burglar. She looks pretty used up as her character should, but she's still a stunning woman with true star charisma and great chemistry with Ford, her old co-star. And, as someone else mentioned, how many 50-year-old women playing character roles get to shack up with the lead in a movie? Well, if anyone could, it's Rita.

Ford was an appealing star without a huge range; this character could have been mined for more depth, but he's fine in the role. Montalban is very good as his money-obsessed partner.

Worth it for Rita.

The noir cycle had run its course by the early 60s, but a few stragglers made it through the gates before the 70s changed the way movies were made and viewed. The Money Trap is one of them, and could have been made, in terms of technique and sensibility, in 1956 rather than a decade later. (Digression: this was a time when a series of European "bombshells," most of whom seem to have learned their lines phonetically, starred in big-budget movies, in Hollywood's dizzy anticipation of multiculturalism. Here we have to endure Elke Sommer whose eyes all but cross in her attempt to pronounce English). The theme is the rot at the core of the American Dream (Norman Mailer's novel of that title appeared in 1966, too). Glenn Ford plays a police detective goaded by Sommer to a higher standard of living than his salary permits. He allows himself to be lured into the company of some very shady characters, chief among whom is Joseph Cotten, and starts his descent down the primrose path. Best part of the movie is the return of Rita Hayworth (Ford and she first paired, unforgettably, in Gilda 20 years earlier), as a blowsy waitress with whom Ford once.... Well, you get the picture. When he asks her how she's been, she grudgingly responds, "I've been around."

Was the world ever really like this?

Pure 1965 black and white, this time machine of a crime drama takes you back to when Elkie Sommer was young, and Joseph Cotten was'nt dead. No profanity, blood or sex on the screen, but everywhere in the painlessly stereotypical screenplay. Predictable to a fault, you seem not to care it's all one big cleche. The jazzy, pre-groovy background music, a totally orignal score by Hal Schaffer, makes this crime-like thing a nostalgic romp of flat-foot flick.

I have always been in love, or at least enchanted, by this Burt Kennedy's surprising film from a westerner as he was. It is a tremendous and solid adaptation from a Lionel White's novel. Unfortunately never released and translated in France and in French. Many of Lionel White were not anyway. Here, Glenn Ford's performance reminds me Fred McMurray in Richard Quine's PUSHOVER, a rogue cop tale, also directed by a non crime film specialist, as Burt Kennedy; Quine was on the contrary a comedy specialist. And it is so touching to see Glenn Ford and his long time friend Rita Hayworth for the last time on screen after GILDA, LADY IN QUESTION, AFFAIR IN TRINIDAD and LOVES OF CARMEN. Yes I definitely love this underrated Burt Kennedy's film noir pulled by a tremendous acting, directing, production design, atmosphere.