It's hard to pigeonhole Inferno in any single genre. The marketing for its first run touted it as "the most breath-taking man hunt and violent love that ever criss-crossed out of the screen," making it sound like a prototypical film noir, which it definitely is, notwithstanding its glowing Technicolor hues. Yet since noir wasn't really a genre - it was a cycle that intersected with many actual genres - Inferno can just as legitimately be called a western, thanks to the desert location and the sight of William Lundigan and Rhonda Fleming wearing cowboy hats and sitting on horses. Then too, Inferno is an action-adventure tale of survival against the odds, with Robert Ryan battling the elements in a parched and scorching environment where he's stranded with a broken leg and few supplies. All of which makes Inferno a surprising picture as well as an enjoyable one.
Dispensing with introductory flourishes, the picture plunges into its story without delay, catching Joe Duncan (Lundigan) and his married mistress, Geraldine Carson (Fleming), in the course of an unusual crime. Gerry's husband, Donald Carson (Ryan), owns a successful mining company. Joe works for Donald and is having a torrid affair with Gerry on the sly. The three traveled into the desert to inspect a prospecting site, and Donald broke his leg in a fall from his horse. Promising to return immediately with medical help, Joe and Gerry left Donald languishing on a hilltop, equipped with a pistol, a water canteen, and not much else. When we meet Joe and Gerry in the opening scene, they've already concluded that they shouldn't return to Joe at all. If they abandon him and misdirect the police who launch a search party, Donald will surely die of exposure, allowing his disloyal employee and unfaithful wife to carry on their affair and inherit his business.
Joe feels no pangs of conscience over this nasty scheme, and Gerry gets rid of hers by deciding they're not murdering Donald, only opting not to rescue him. What the duplicitous duo fails to reckon with is Donald's reawakening will to live. In the past he's been a heavy drinker with a reckless personality, but the prospect of a lingering death in the desert lends new focus to his mind. Fashioning a splint for his leg and protective pads for his hands, he scrambles down from the rocky hilltop and starts a long, hard trek back to civilization. Inferno cuts between his adventures - foraging for water, hunting for food, signaling for help with fire and smoke - and the machinations of Joe and Gerry, whose conspiracy seems to be working nicely until Joe pilots a plane over the crime area and discovers that Donald is alive, on the move, and surely bent on revenge.
A great deal of Inferno centers on Donald's solitary struggle in the wilderness, brought to life by Ryan's eloquent facial expressions and intensely delivered voiceovers. Ryan was a first-class boxer in his youth, and his athleticism shines through in the difficult exploits - lowering himself down a cliffside, dodging showers of falling rocks - that Joe has to complete to stay alive. In the noir-style melodramatic scenes, Lundigan capitalizes on his sturdy good looks and famously smooth-toned voice while Fleming plays the slightly reluctant femme fatale with the poise and beauty that were her trademarks. The solid supporting cast includes Larry Keating as Donald's lawyer, Robert Burton and Carl Betz as police officers on the hunt for Donald, and Henry Hull as a grizzled prospector who precipitates the climax by finding the missing magnate, bringing him to his isolated cabin, and saving him a second time when a fight with Joe sets the shack ablaze.
Inferno was directed by Roy Ward Baker, known as Roy Baker at that stage of his career. His thoroughgoing professionalism is visible throughout the swiftly paced story, despite the challenge of working with an unwieldy double-camera 3D system in Apple Valley, a portion of the Mojave where apple trees hadn't flourished for a long time and temperatures could be drastically colder than you'd guess from this movie's title and premise. The picture was a Twentieth Century Fox project, and while studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck often looked over the shoulders of his directors, Baker had a great deal of creative freedom since Zanuck was busy supervising Henry Koster's epic The Robe, released as the first-ever CinemaScope production about a month after Inferno premiered.
Zanuck rightly foresaw that widescreen movies would have a far brighter future than 3D novelties, and Inferno can be seen as a momentary effort to hedge his bet in case 3D managed to stick around. The studio never returned to the format, and sure enough, 3D fizzled out after CinemaScope took hold. Baker and Ballard serve up the requisite number of in-your-face 3D thrills, from the strike of a rattlesnake and the fall of a boulder to a fiercely hurled lantern and a roof collapsing in a cascade of flames. But their approach to the format is generally tasteful, used primarily to convey a sense of the desert's sprawling spaces and lurking dangers. In any case, Inferno has as much power in two dimensions as in three. Film editor Robert Simpson also livens up the action with some witty and surprising cuts.
The 1953 review of Inferno in The New York Times criticized it for being "laboriously explicit at times" and for "hoarding the fireworks till the finale," but the critic had high praise for the "adult and restrained treatment" that imbues the "simple, grim story idea with conviction, irony and chilling crescendo." The picture still holds up impressively as a film noir, a western, an action-adventure yarn, and an entertaining example of spirited screen storytelling.
Director: Roy Baker
Producer: William Bloom
Screenplay: Francis Cockrell
Cinematographer: Lucien Ballard
Film Editing: Robert Simpson
Art Direction: Lyle Wheeler, Lewis Creber
Music: Paul Sawtell
With: Robert Ryan (Donald Whitley Carson III), Rhonda Fleming (Geraldine Carson), William Lundigan (Joseph Duncan), Larry Keating (Dave Emory), Henry Hull (Sam Elby), Carl Betz (Lt. Mike Platt), Robert Burton (Sheriff)
Technicolor-83m.
by David Sterritt
