Alaska Passage (1959)

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

That was an excellent one.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Edward Bernds who as a producer/director is mostly identified with the Bowery Boys produced this northern frontier melodrama about a pair of men who share a partnership in trucking company. Bill Williams is the hands-on management type while Leslie Bradley is the front office guy. What brought these two together as business partners God only knows, but the affair Williams is having with Bradley's wife Lyn Thomas will definitely drive them apart.Thomas is the reason to see this B film, she's one piece of work. This could have been a plot for the Northern Exposure series. Fortunately for Williams he has good girl Nora Hayden.Shot on location for nickels and dimes Bernds did not splurge for color and that's a pity. Some colorful Alaskan rustic characters are part of the plot as well.But Lyn Thomas really owns this film

An Associated Producers Production for 20th Century-Fox. Photographed in RegalScope (black-and-white). Location scenes filmed in Alaska. Copyright 1959 by Associated Producers, Inc. U.S. release: February 1959. U.K. release: 15 March 1959. Australian release: 9 April 1959. 6,436 feet. 72 minutes.SYNOPSIS: Al Graham is operator and co-owner of an Alaskan trucking firm which transports goods from the small town of Tanana Crossing to the large city of Fairbanks. Because of high operating costs and hazardous roads which are often blocked by landslides, the business is in the red and silent-partner Gerard Mason journeys up from Seattle to discuss matters with Al. Trouble begins when Gerard's wife, Janet, arrives on the scene.NOTES: First production from Robert L. Lippert's Associated Producers, Inc.COMMENT: Miss Hayden and Miss Thomas are attractive lasses, but anyone who can stand a jot of Bill Williams and Nick Dennis without frequent trips to the bar is superhuman. There is some mild (if unexpected and completely phony in terms of script development) excitement at the climax, but overall this movie is weighed down by a sluggish, boring story, tediously told, with all the zip and pace of an octogenarian tortoise.

Say, wasn't that slick the way Mason (Leslie Bradley) tricked his wife (Lyn Thomas) into revealing she had the hots for business partner Al Graham (Bill Williams). I mean, he wasn't really even trying except for a hunch he might have had. You could tell she felt like a dope.By that point in the story, Janet Mason was firing on all cylinders while playing the angles in her relationship with Al and marriage to Jerry Mason. The scheming two-timer tried to convince hubby that she was only trying to score a few shares of the business away from Al to gain a greater percentage of the trucking operation. When Al didn't buy it, she shot him in the back!! Wow!! - how would you like to be hitched to someone like that? As in more than a few Westerns of the day, and this never ceases to amaze me, Jerry gets shot from behind and clutches his chest like that's where he got hit by the bullet. I just never understood that.Here's another head scratcher - in any scene in which Al and driving buddy Pete (Nick Dennis) are shown in the cab of their truck talking, they're sitting right next to each other. However in the long shots of the truck riding down the road, they're right where they would be on opposite ends of the bench seat next to their respective windows. It just looked goofy because the back and forth views occurred more than once and it was more than obvious.Hey, and how about Tina Boyd (Nora Hayden) astounded by the price of a hamburger at the café diner - it was a buck! I'd normally mention something like this in my old time movie reviews to contrast the price of things back in the day compared to now, but here it was mentioned because commodities were genuinely expensive in Alaska compared to the lower forty eight states in which one could probably get a burger and fries for about half that amount. Younger viewers I'm sure wouldn't even be able to relate to that.Well I mention all these observations because that's what makes some of these old time flicks entertaining for me when the story itself is only so-so. None of the players here were familiar to me, and let's face it, how interesting can a story be about guys who drive trucks for a living. The intrigue between the principals and that business about Al's good will against Mason's capital was about as creative as things got, except of course that wild finish when Janet turned into a crazy woman and lost all comprehension of the laws of physics by forcing poor Barnie to ram down the winding highway at breakneck speed. Don't you just hate to lose a sixteen wheeler that way?

Bill Williams plays the part-owner of a trucking company in Alaska who runs into trouble due to landslides closing down roads, a business partner who doesn't think Williams is running the company properly and wants to squeeze him out, and his partner's hot blonde wife, with whom Williams had a fling before she was married--and she still wants him. To further complicate matters, a pretty and leggy hitchhiker shows up, takes a job as a waitress in the local diner and sets her sights on Williams, much to the annoyance of Williams' former paramour. This is one of Fox's lower-budget programmers, but it's not all that bad. Williams is earnest, Nora Hayden--the waitress--is a real looker, and the location footage in Alaska helps a lot. The film is hurt by pedestrian writing--courtesy of the film's director, Edward Bernds--and flat performances by a weak supporting cast, but overall it's worth a watch if you've got nothing better to do.