Protraph
Lack of good storyline.
Zlatica
One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.
Geraldine
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
mark.waltz
Three trucks filled with extremely heavy bricks of solid gold, stolen from a fast moving train in the most clever way, becomes the caper of the century in this fraught with tension action drama where veteran actors Gene Raymond, Wayne Morris, Elisha Cook Jr. and several others make an attempt to transport it without being caught. As soon as the train theft is discovered, police across the nation are notified, and every highway is being scoped for the culprits. This becomes riveting simply to watch the five men in various states of paranoia in three different trucks driving down these highways of potential destruction, their lone thoughts driving each of them crazy in different ways. Cook is the most thoughtful of the five, planning to take his son down to Rio to start a new life, practically certain of his success, and even getting the viewer to sort of feel sorry for them. Raymond has a girl (Jeanne Cooper) waiting for him at the end of the line for the final stretch, but for a few of them, their road isn't paved with gold; It is paved with doom.Yes, the Jeanne Cooper I mention above is the same Jeanne Cooper who schemed and loved and clicked her well manicured nails together for four decades as the wealthy and powerful Katharine Chancellor on "The Young and the Restless". She only pops up for the last twenty minutes of the film, but makes the most of her scenes, especially as she reveals how she wishes that her lover had not stooped to theft to make their dreams come true. But the fact that she obviously abandons a job to help him shows her as complicit, and she even goes as far as to help push the gold up large loading slides, showing that she's made of stronger stuff than most women, yet not as quite as evil as the great film noir femme fatales. If you want to see Ms. Cooper really in action on the big screen, check her out in the prison drama "House of Women" where she goes up against "Another World's" Constance Ford with a great cat fight.While this film is tense and riveting at times, it also often becomes an absurd look as to why crime doesn't pay and the desperate measures criminals take to get away with their latest caper yet are constantly paranoid of what the end will bring. It is like they know that they will be caught. Only fools run in the face of arrest, and often that spells a meeting with the grim reaper. Raymond, Cooper and his young partner (Steven Ritch) go through so much in the last few reels that watching them makes you see how absurd it all is, that no heist is easy, and that when it all comes out in the open, they are not going to go down without some gunfire. In general, this is a pretty good caper action/thriller that is obvious as to how it will end, but what makes it unique is how each of the criminals reveals some of their back story to indicate what brought them to such desperation, and how their own inner psyche manipulates their individual destinies.
st-shot
It's a dark and stormy night as five men pull off a daring train robbery of 10 million in gold. Led by the stoic Eddie Harris (Gene Raymond) they split the steal in three and head for LA to melt it down. Two of the transports are intercepted but the third reaches it's destination and is in the process of blowing town through an ingenious method (I believe later employed on the first show of Mission Impossible) when the LA Freeway interrupts.Plunder Road may well have been an ideal B in its day with its stripped down (72 minutes) pace and crosscutting between the divided mob. After taking in the better budgeted denser A pic this heist film immediately cut to the chase allowing the movie goer to exhale. Director Hubert Cornfield (Night of the Following Day) does not dally long with personality and character development as he expeditiously leaves them to their thoughts and the fact that they are all in for a huge payday.30s matinée idol Gene Raymond registers as the taciturn ringleader who lightens up once he feels he's in the clear. Chester Morris, Elisha Cook, Steven Ritch and Stafford Repp as societal marginals born to lose adequately deliver with few words. Cinematographer Ernie Haller gives the picture a good look while Irving Gert's music is a heavy handed brass attack that overwhelms in tense moments. Plunder Road does have some pot holes but it remains well paced with relatively benign criminals that has us feeling like the waitress in the diner who hopes in some way that they get away with it.
bensonmum2
$10 million in gold is being shipped by rail to San Francisco from Salt Lake City. Five men are determined to see that the gold doesn't make it. The men successfully pull-off a daring nighttime robbery and snatch the $10 million. Their plan includes loading the gold into three different trucks. At regular intervals, they set off for the coast where they intend to rendezvous and split their loot. Will they make it? (This is a film noir – you know things are bound to go horribly wrong.)Plunder Road is a nice little low-budget noir/crime/drama film. While I enjoyed every second of the movie, the highlight for me has to be the robbery that takes up at least the first 15 minutes of the film's 72 minute runtime. Similar to Rififi, the robbery is carried out almost entirely in silence. The plan is well thought out and executed. The coordination between the five guys makes for a great watch. Director Hubert Cornfield expertly filmed this section of the movie. He wisely included almost every detail – from the masks to the gassing of the guards to the handling of the explosives. Some of the camera angles Cornfield chose helped to increase the excitement of the whole thing. I also think that filming the heist in pouring rain was a wise decision. The rain added even more suspense and atmosphere. While I'm not overly familiar with most of the cast (Elisha Cook, Jr, being the exception), they all give nice performances. I think I was most impressed with Stafford Repp as Roly Adams, but that may only be because he's familiar to me having played Chief O'Hara on Batman in the 60s. Plunder Road's ending is appropriately bleak. As with most good film noir, none of the characters comes out unscathed.
GManfred
This is a driving movie. I don't mean compelling, I mean driving, as in trucks driving and driving, which takes up about an hour of the picture (it is 72 minutes long). It is about a train robbery by five pretty savvy dudes, among them Gene Raymond, Wayne Morris and Elisha Cook, Jr. We learn that they have been around the block, with some considerable jail time among them.And so, after the robbery they drive. Nothing of note happens except a few isolated incidents, wherein the group is reduced to two. The incidents are so innocuous that you hardly notice, so ordinary and lacking in tension is the storyline.The ending is fairly good, but by that time you have been so numbed by the preceding 68 minutes that it's a nice feeling to get the whole thing over with. It is a pretty good movie, and that's the best I can say for it. You know that old Show Biz song, "That's Entertainment"? I didn't hear it.
