Dangerous Mission (1954)

Simply Perfect

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

A slightly different RKO Pictures movie to the normal - this one's in colour, with a bigger budget, and produced by disaster maestro Irwin Allen, no less. The story mixes in a little film noir with an outdoor action adventure template, and you can tell Allen's influence by the way an action scene has been shoehorned into the narrative at regular intervals. Avalanches, forest fires, you name it - they're here, although they have zero to do with the main storyline.Said storyline sees a woman (Piper Laurie, decades before she became the domineering mother in CARRIE) witnessing a murder in New York, and fleeing the murderer by escaping to a national park in Montana. There, she meets up with various characters, including the butch and heroic Victor Mature, a mild-mannered photographer (Vincent Price, no less), the voluptuous Betta St. John (playing an Indian!), and the thickset William Bendix.The narrative is a kind of whodunit, with the mystery angle played up for the first half or so (when the characters aren't contending with the random natural disasters, that is). Things become more wild and adventure-style in the second half, with a suitably exciting climax to finish things off. It's not a great film - to be honest, the plot seems all over the place at times - but it is a mildly engaging one nonetheless.

There is one reason to view this...Technicolor. Oh, maybe another. The surreal beauty of the female Stars. They have the most wonderful eyes and sublime looks and are all attired in cheesy 1950's wardrobes with a Native American motif that is gorgeous. The 3-D may have been needed to propel rocks and fire out of the screen but these Women would have done it in 2-D. Aside from the eye candy there is little else here that is worthy of attention. There is an unfulfilled and predictable plot. Some cardboard performances stiffen things a bit, but it moves along at a welcome luscious pace.If the viewer could disconnect sight from brain this might be a winner. But alas it is all simply simple and nothing but postcard imagery with a Hollywood Magazine gloss.

When "Dangerous Mission" was made as a another "B" color feature in 1954, it was probably considered by its producers to be a a routine action script. The film did have lovely young Piper Laurie, Betta St. John, Harry Cheshire. plus Vincent Price, William Bendix and as star handsome Victor Mature. But I assert that it had some hidden assets as well: very intelligent direction, unusually lovely Glacier National Park scenery, a logical storyline and first-rate production values from Roy Webb's music to costumes by Michael Wulfe and sets to art direction and second-unit work by Asst. Director James Lane. Also, the script was what I term a "sense-of-life film", of the same sort as "Bend of the River", "Smoke Signal" and "The Miracle Worker". We as viewers in other words only learn about a charismatic but suspect hero gradually, by experiencing his actions which are set against his negative reputation. Price steals the film as a complex character out of place among straightforward personalities; Mature lacks the speech for a senior detective but Bendix, St. John and Laurie and Cheshire are all very good in their roles. Make no mistake; this is an inexpensive film, with the outdoor actions using rear- projection to include most of the Glacier Park locales. But the film looks colorful and very spacious for a "B". It presents a square dance interrupted by an avalanche, a battle with a live-wire, a first-rate forest fire, a stirring chase and climactic battle on the glacier, plus intelligent dialogue and character-revelation scenes. The makers have put together I suggest a first-rate romance, an interesting mystery noir, and a very entertaining adventure. I never miss this one, having discovered it fifty years ago and championed its values for years. With a Keith Andes as its star, it might have become famous.

Did the State of Montana invest a huge chunk of money in Dangerous Mission? We see, in brash Technicolor, the snow-capped mountains and crystalline lakes of Big Sky country; we even get to see a forest fire and a couple of avalanches, one of which seems to have something to do with a plot. There's not much else to divert the attention, except the spectacle of white actors "made up" to impersonate native Americans (they look as though they'd been steeped in Paas Easter-egg dye). A fine cast --Victor Mature, William Bendix, Vincent Price and the very young Piper Laurie -- is thrown to the winds in a wisp of a story that seems left over from the final days of film noir, reworked as a Western, and finally released as this mash-note to mountain lodges and dude ranches. It concerns a woman (Laurie) who witnessed an execution back in the evil east and is being tracked down to insure her silence. The song "It's A Quarter to Three" keeps cropping up as though it had great thematic relevance, but it doesn't. Dangerous Mission has no theme, let alone thematic relevance.