“Can
happiness buy money?”
The barred shadows of Double Indemnity loom over this tale of an
insurance investigator lured to the dark side by his materialistic mistress. Roadblock is a distillation of Indemnity’s central theme – itself a
noir staple – of a good man who loses his moral compass through love of the
wrong woman. When she repents, the film accrues a layer of cruel irony, its
protagonist locked into a course of action that can only result in his
downfall.
The setup has gold-digger
Diane playing upright Joe Peters for a sucker, posing as his wife at the
airport ticket desk to get a discounted flight to LA. During a weather-enforced
stopover, verbal jousting displaces sexual tension, as was often the case in noir,
as Joe’s growls of disapproval – “I don’t like chisellers” – ricochet off Diane’s
cynical rebuttals. Belittling “Honest Joe” for his lack of ambition, she
nevertheless finds him attractive; Joe, for his part, is caught in her web –
McGraw may have been the stone-faced heavy nonpareil, but his evocation of
Joe’s crumbling self-esteem, his moral certitude visibly punctured by Diane’s
jibes, is no less convincing.
Far less plausible is
Diane’s realisation, as if at the flick of a switch, that she’d be happier with
Joe and his modest salary than with the flashy racketeer Kendall Webb, who
swathes her in (stolen) furs. It is Webb with whom Joe, hoping to buy Diane’s
affections, conspires to intercept a currency shipment underwritten by his
company. Diane’s change of heart, imparted with typical B-movie brevity, makes her
a less dynamic presence; Dixon, so sharp in those early rounds of sparring with
McGraw, has fewer opportunities to shine as the film goes on.
Nonetheless, this
development does sharpen the irony of Joe’s predicament – he becomes a criminal
for no reason – as well as the focus on a prominent trope of these postwar
thrillers: once the wheels of a plan are set in motion, it is impossible to put
the brakes on, as Joe finds when he tries to back out of his arrangement with Webb.
Assigned to the robbery case by his superiors, he becomes, like the
protagonists of Somewhere in the Night
and The Big Clock, a man effectively investigating
himself.
McGraw is as purposeful as
ever, effortlessly carrying the plot to its ruthless but logical conclusion
after a desperate car chase along the much-filmed LA River culvert. Roadblock is a solid platform for
McGraw’s too-often untapped talents as a leading man, but it is no Double Indemnity. It moves at a fair
clip but in a straight line, avoiding the bends and twists of the more
compelling noir narratives, and Daniels’ direction is pedestrian. Perhaps as a
consequence, the photography by the great Nicholas Musuraca is uninspired on
this occasion.
Kevin Grant
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