The Crooked Road

One would dearly love to play Devil's advocate and say something positive about this lamentable opus but it has alas no redeeming features whatsoever and is nothing more or less than a stinker. For an actor of Robert Ryan's magnitude it represents the bottom of the barrel but at least he has a few decent roles still to come. As for Stewart Granger this is sadly typical of the mostly mediocre material of his post MGM career. Nadia Gray, Marius Goring and George Coulouris make up the numbers whilst one is able to put a face to the voice of King of the Dubbers, Robert Rietty, as a policeman. The editing is simply atrocious and the whole enterprise is utterly devoid of momentum. Although director Don Chaffey is no doubt known to devotees of the Fantasy genre, he ended up where he belonged, in Television.

I had to comment on this movie- it was looking all forlorn with a grand total of '0 votes'! Well, here goes. . . I taped this film from the TV, because I'm a huge Stewart Granger fan. I have to say that I didn't keep the film! It's not the worst movie in the world but I've seen better. There's a vague suggestion of a plot that goes something like this: A reporter (Robert Ryan) arrives in a country somewhere in the Balkans and exposes the dirty dealings of it's dictator (Granger). Of course, he's eager to leave the country with this information, and the dictator's wife, who happens to fall in love with him. One of the better scenes is one where Granger 'poisons' Ryan to get him to talk then, while the latter writhes in agony, puts his feet up and reads the newspaper! There's a lot of backstabbing and skullduggery and you come away feeling more than a little disappointed. I'll stick to Granger's earlier films in future- Ryan's too, for that matter.