Plunder of the Sun (1953)

American insurance man (that’s what he says, anyway) Al Colby (Glenn Ford) has somehow found himself stranded in Havana, Cuba, running short on funds for anything but alcohol. So, despite knowing better and playing hard to get, he agrees to be hired by a shady guy in wheelchair named Thomas Berrien (Francis L. Sullivan) who travels with his own private nurse Anna Luz (Patricia Medina) for a bit of smuggling. Colby’s supposed to transport a small package to Mexico. Said package turns out to contain three manuscript pages pointing the way to the lost treasures of the Zapotecs, so not surprisingly, there are rather a lot of characters much shadier than Berrien or Colby after it. Ana Luz isn’t terribly trustworthy either.

Once Berrien inevitably dies, it’s Colby who has to deal with all of them, for he decides that his deal with Berrien has expired through the man’s death, and it’s his choice what’s going to happen with the loot now.

John Farrow’s Plunder of the Sun is a pretty great little movie, freely mixing elements of the noir with those of the (post-)colonialist adventure movie but giving some surprising twists to various genre tropes.

Take as an example the two female characters in the film, Ana Luz and self-declared “tramp” Julie Barnes (Diana Lynn). In most films from the 50s, one of them would be the classical good girl, the other either the femme fatal helping Colby on his way to an inevitable doom for her own gain or the damaged girl dying for him and releasing him into the good girl’s arm. Here, both women lie to Colby and betray him to a degree, but both of them also eventually join with him for more than their personal gain, both having complicated motivations not exclusively centred around the film’s protagonist. Julie, who – badly – uses a desperate kind of sexuality to get what she wants certainly follows the standard femme fatale mode more closely, yet the film argues that this is an assumed role she has to free herself from to become an actual person, and even lets her do this without feeling the need to kill her as some form of punishment. And in Luz’s case, most of her morally dubious acts spring from a feeling of obligation to someone else, the sort of honourable motivation for bad deeds usually reserved for men in this kind of film. In the end, she’ll end up as Colby’s romantic partner as well his future partner in adventure, this being the rare film of its time where a happy end doesn’t mean domesticity. And the hero riding into the sunset with a Mexican (well, as played by someone of British and Spanish decent) woman isn’t exactly the sort of thing common in 50s cinema.

Colby himself is an interesting variation on the noir and hardboiled adventure protagonist, too. Ruthless to the point of cruelty like the genres demand, he also has a heavy moral streak, trying to bully Julie into cleaning up her act out of what feels like a combination of embarrassment (she’s really not terribly good at being a bad girl) and human concern expressed through the rude trappings of 50s manhood, and going through the whole film of adventure, violence and betrayal for monetary gain, but following his own moral rules doing so. So he doesn’t want to sell the treasure illegally or really get the money the various other shady interest groups offer him but is exclusively aiming to get the reward money the Mexican government would pay for the archaeological finds he hopes to make through the manuscripts. Again, treating the local government as the rightful owners of archaeological finds is not a line of thought found often in films about white guys looking for the treasure of brown or black people (hell, even museums and archaeologists in the real world didn’t), yet the film uses it so matter of factly as it were.

Apart from these interesting elements, Plunder of the Sun is simply a very fine example of its genres, Farrow getting as much of the grim noir mood out of sun-drenched ruins in Mexico as he does of nightly shadows; but then, what’s more noir than pre-Invasion Mesoamerican religious practices (apart from Spanish conquistadors, of course)? Farrow certainly knows how to build a suspense scene out of these elements, too.

As a whole, this is a wonderfully economical film, packing a noir-complicated plot, half a dozen three-dimensional characters (most of them rather memorable) and a couple of dubious lectures about the Zapotecs, as well as a more than decent amount of scenes of Glenn Ford getting hit in the head, into eighty minutes. I wouldn’t know what more to ask of a movie.