Hunt2546 Thin, ultimately silly film is given unearned heft by virtue of Jack Draper's cinematography which turns ancient Mexican ruins into the nightmare city of classic noir, the wet streets and shadowy alleys that are the essence of the genre. Glenn Ford is sour and surly as an American insurance man who travels the tropics with a full wardrobe of tweed suits (maybe that's why he's so grim). Down on his luck in a vividly evoked pre-Castro Cuba, he signs on to smuggle a certain antiquity BACK into the Mexico from whence it came for reaasons that never make much sense. Soon there are three or four factions vying for whatever he has taped under his left nipple: a sleazy archaeologist (Sean McClory), an American hot thang with plasticene-brassiere breasts that jut like nose cones (Dianna Lynne), a sultry hispanic gal (Patricia Medina), and finally some kind of Mexican expert and his thug son. There's too much fist fighting over a gun--Glenn and Sean duke it out about four times over Sean's Colt Detective Special--and the whole thing never makes much sense. But damn, it looks GREAT! Don't know who this Draper guy is--he seems mostly to have worked in Mexico--but his deep focus photography really brings the location to menacing, palpable life. The best passage follows as Ford evokes the ruins and what they mean to dim, pointy-titted Lynne, and it's pre-PC so he's able to make vivid the human sacrifice that blasphemed the place and thus give it a vibration of tragedy and death otherwise unearned in the movie. The other delight is McClory's debauched archaeologist, under a blonde crewcut and some heavy tortoise-shell specs. He's very vivid and far more charismatic than the dreary, mumbly Ford The movie really looses it in its climax, and ends in a silly shootout and fistfight in a backlot Hollywood set that wastes all the good will it had built up with the location work; suddenly, it looks like early TV and in a sense it has become early TV.

MartinHafer I have never read the original novel by David Dodge, so I cannot in any way compare this movie to his book. I assume the other reviewer who felt the book was MUCH better was right--that usually is the case.It's worth seeing this film just so you can get a glimpse of 1950's Cuba. There are only a few films set there (a couple of Errol Flynn's last films were shot there) and it's a nice chance to see the country--as most Americans have never been there or seen the place in films.The film begins in Mexico. Glenn Ford is being held by the authorities and a worker from the US Consulate tells him to explain what happened. So, Ford begins to talk and the film flashes back one week to Havana. It seems he's been stranded there without funds and is waiting and hoping a letter with money soon arrives. When an odd man in a wheelchair offers him way too much money to deliver an 'unimportant trinket', Ford rightly figures that it's VERY important. And soon he's on his way to Mexico to go treasure hunting.All in all, it's amazing how uninteresting the film becomes. While it all concerns a HUGE treasure trove, the film never seems very realistic nor exciting. It's hard to put my finger on it, but I felt pretty bored bored during all these betrayals, drunken brawls and the like. Much of it was, I think, because Ford's dealings with the white-haired man never made much sense. Also what made no sense was the casting of Diana Lynn. At times the film tried to have her behave like a vamp or femme fatale--it was akin to seeing Donna Douglas or June Lockhart doing this! She just seemed ill at ease and the wrong lady for such a role. Cute and perky yes---a drunken slut, certainly not!

funkyfry Glenn Ford has one of his strongest roles in John Farrow's "Plunder of the Sun", playing a debt collector in over his head in the stolen antiquities market in Cuba and Mexico. The film is unique in its time and genre in that the entire film was made on location in Mexico, and the ancient ruins provide an interesting backdrop to the story and characters. It's a fun movie but ultimately all the build-up doesn't really lead to anything as interesting as it seemed it might.There are many elements here that will remind the viewer of Huston's "Maltese Falcon" – the general theme centered around a stolen cultural artifact, the fat man with mysterious motives (in this case, Francis L. Sullivan), the weird violent guy chasing after the treasure (a bleached blond Sean McClory), etc. And then of course we also have some of the elements that are typical of many suspense films of the 40s/50s (the "noir" kind): the spoiled rich party girl Julie (Diana Lynn), devoted but devious glamour lady Anna (Patricia Medina), and a decidedly ambiguous leading man in Ford's Al Colby.So essentially we have a not-so-original story set in a very different and more convincing (because it's real) exotic setting, for what it's worth. I really enjoyed the scenes with Colby exploring the ruins when he first arrives in Mexico. Later we find that his character has apparently had a true spiritual epiphany on this occasion although his narrative comments only hint at this and he remains his typical ambiguous self through the rest of the film – even going so far as to rob the ruins with the imminently unpleasant archaeologist Jefferson (McClory). This is typical of the problems I see in this film – the resolution for the characters seemed in almost every case to be at odds with how they had been established earlier in the film, and there was little in the way of effective development to explain these changes. The film spends so much time building up the Julie character as a hussy from the Gloria Grahame school, but then it blows off all that steam with a lame hospital bedroom confessional scene. I really am not sure what they were trying to do with the Anna character. At times Farrow's direction and the costuming seemed to imply a kind of religious iconography, especially in the scene where Anna enters the room where Colby is arguing with Mexican archaeologist Navarro, with a procession behind her, wearing a kind of veil, and holding a gun in front of her like the rosary – you could call her the may queen of death. But the film didn't really establish her very well as either a "fatale" character or a mature partner for the hero – like most the characters in this film her actions seem arbitrary and to depend only on the circumstances that the plot demands. Speaking of Navarro, he's so underdeveloped that it's very jarring to find him later having an important impact on the plot's resolution. We don't even get his credit on IMDb, much less on the film itself, so I don't even know who played the role.Ford's strong characterization provides enough impetus to carry the film along; the writers apparently saw "Gilda" and decided that Glenn Ford would be even more popular if he was a complete misogynist. There are some really fun lines of dialog that he throws out there in his cynical way. I enjoyed the scenes where he devised the code to try to fool Navarro. McClory was also very impressive in a menacing character role. There are numerous small character parts that are all handled with great consistency by director Farrow.A final note – one interesting aspect of this movie is that the various "hiding places" used in the film are all so terribly obvious that it's almost impossible to believe it was accidental. And I believe there was even a line of dialog in the film about the best hiding place being the most obvious one. Thus Ford hides the parchment in his shoes (duh!), with the hotel lobby clerk, etc. And then when they find the treasure it's "hidden" in a spot where tourists stroll by every day. After absconding with the treasure McClory and his accomplice "hide" in the warehouse of the city museum! I'm not really sure if there was a deeper reason why this theme was being addressed, but it does also apply to the film's romantic resolutions. Colby ends up with Anna, the first woman he speaks to in the film and one who he expected to sleep with that very night, and Julie ends up with Navarro's son, who she has seemed to take for granted through the entire film. Possibly this is an element that was interesting in the novel but underplayed in the film, I'm really not sure having never read the book.

bux David Dodge's novel is brought to the screen with Ford excellent as protagonist Al Colby. The script however, plays fast and loose with the novel, changing the locale from Peru to Mexico and now the search is on for Aztec artifacts instead of Incan. All things considered, this is a tightly directed and well acted tale. It has not been available for viewing as it seems to be tied up in litigation along with "Island in the Sky"(1953) and "The High and the Mighty"(1954)as the Wayne Family battles Warner Brothers and we are the losers.