Ride the Pink Horse

I don't really care very much for Robert Montgomery as a serious actor; they must have been at least a half dozen or more Hollywood actors at the time who could have handled the role better: Bogart, Cagney, Flynn, Power, Holden, Ford (etc). But despite being miscast, Montgomery pulls it off with some help from a great supporting cast. Great writing by a woman writer, Dorothy B Hughes, and a great screenplay by Lederer and Hecht (Lancaster's old buddy) provides the viewer with a real treat for atmosphere and storytelling. Gagin comes to New Mexico to square accounts with the guy who shot his partner, Shorty. Mr. Hugo is well-played by. Fred Clark. But the person who steals this film is not Montgomery, Clark or even Thomas Gomez, who was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor role as Pancho in the film. No, the film is stolen by actress, Wanda Hendrix as Pila, a wild-looking, space cadet, who is fiercely loyal to Gagin. One of the best film noir pieces you will ever see.

In one of a couple of films done at Universal starring Montgomery that are hard to find. Ex-solider Lucky Gagin (Robert Montgomery) arrives in the little southwestern town of San Pablo during a hectic fiesta weekend. He's come here seeking revenge against the man he holds responsible for his friend's death. But his quest may be derailed by one of the motley assortment of characters he meets: scheming federal agent Retz (Art Smith, spooky-eyed young Mexican girl Pilar (Wanda Hendrix), and boisterous carousel operator Pancho (Thomas Gomez), among others.

Montgomery does a very good job in both the directing and acting departments. The film showcases several stylish flourishes, and maintains an evocative, "stranger in a strange land" aura of uncertainty and mild paranoia. His performance as the plainspoken Gagin is also a nice stretch from his usual smooth charmer. He's blunt, occasionally rude, maybe not the sharpest guy in the room, but cunning enough to be a threat to those he targets.

The movie takes an unexpected turn in the last third which helps set it apart from the other crime pictures of the period, but in my opinion it weakened the resolution a bit. I liked Hendrix, and Gomez is affable in a character type he would go on to play several times in the future. Fred Clark, as a crime boss, and Art Smith as the fed, are unusual casting choices that work. The movie earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor for Thomas Gomez.

This is a classic pseudo film noir. It means to emulate, but not necessarily be, a true film noir.

Robert Montgomery is excellent and believable as a man driven to revenge the death of his war time pal.

The scenes with Wanda Hendrix as, in turns, a guileless teen, a knowing friend and a woman who 'sees things' are taut and dramatic. There are a few moments of humor there too.

Mr Montgomery's direction is both intelligent and convincing. There are moments of drama. Moments of near pathos. Moments of comedy. Moments of boredom - from the characters, not the audience.

The 'Fed' and 'Pancho' the carousel owner are interesting and engaging characters. Not hollow or cardboard cutouts that one might see in some films.

All in all it is a very enjoyable film and a must see for those that appreciate both the acting skills and the directorial skills of Mr. Robert Montgomery.

I saw this film when I was a young boy when it first came out in 1947 but didn't truly appreciate it till I saw it on TCM the other night again. I agree with all your commentators as to its enigmatic mystery and its possible shortfalls attributable to Montgomery vis a vis Bogart. I found the dialogue and the monologues gripping. In later looking this movie up here I discovered why: the script was by Ben Hecht (of Front Page fame). No wonder it was so great. As many of your commentators point out (and very perceptively too) the individual performances of Gomez, Hendrix, Clark, etc. were all splendid, not to forget Montgomery himself. But TCM must have edited the film or else I fell asleep watching it: I definitely did not see Gomez being beaten up by anyone while being watched by uncomprehending children. That part was definitely not in the version that I watched, sad to say. One of the strongest parts of the film was the disillusionment and cynicism expressed by the Montgomery character against patriotism, and WWII and its profiteers in typical film-noir fashion. Also strikingly evocative and disturbing was the final scene in which the innocent-appearing and passive Hendrix character finally opens up to her friends and re-enacts the events of the film in a vivacious and cynical way to show her friends how sophisticated she is after all. What a dash of cold water in the face of those who expected a romantic ending between two such repressed characters who made a specialty out of never showing their emotions. A great, great movie.

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.