Dangerous Mission (1954) This movie gave us a fairly good view of how terrified studios and theaters were of the little box appearing in everybody's homes........the TV set.
Why leave the house if you could watch all kinds of entertaining stuff on that little black-and-white screen in your living room?
To answer that question......along came CINEMASCOPE!.....and 3-D! (which could put a roaring lion right in your lap.....)
While 20th Century Fox afforded Cinemascope a lavish, spectacular, big budget debut with 1953's "The Robe", 3-D movies seemed to exist in the pulpy, scrappy low-budget world of exploitation cinema......with monsters, meteors, and other larger than life disasters flagrantly hurled at people's eyeballs for a quick, visceral thrill.........
Silly, silly movies.......but oh were they damn fun.
This rough-and-tumble little item rolled off Howard Hughes's RKO assembly line.......filmed in Montana's beautiful Glacier National Park but still top loaded with standard rear-projection-screen studio fakery....
In color that looks like somebody's old snapshots, things kick off with a great noir-ish sequence...... a nightclub piano player shot dead to the screams of a female witness who flees the scene.
The gangster responsible dispatches a hitman to rub her out.......whom we only get a glimpse of from the back of the chair he's sitting on.....
Then it's on to scenic Montana, where a resort hotel's perky newsstand cashier (Piper Laurie) is being courted by a mysterious new guest (Victor Mature) and an amateur photographer (Vincent Price.)
Little Miss Perky, of course, is the deep-in-hiding witness who saw the piano player catch a slug, but the movie briefly toys with the plot gimmick of making us ponder which of her two guys is the hitman sent to snuff her.
Uh......seriously? Does any hardcore movie fan with at least 3 functioning brain cells need to figure out whether the villain is hunky, stalwart Vic Mature or.....Vincent Price??
Well that's not important anyway. The real jollies commence with a series of 3-D photographed disasters that roll right in like regularly scheduled music numbers......
Our plucky romantic triangle manage to first survive a square dance interrupted by an avalanche.....(who thought of building this house on the side of a mountain?). While they're between a rock and hard place, they must dodge a snaking live electrical wire.......and not much later, volunteer to help put out a raging forest fire......(making this movie a complete Shake 'n Bake experience)
To paraphrase Thelma Ritter's line from 'All About Eve'......everything but the wolves snappin' at their heels.
But wait! There's more!
You don't want to miss the inevitable chase-across-the-glacier showdown between Hero, Hitman and Heroine, some of which was actually filmed on the glacier, before it wraps up on an obviously indoor RKO paper-mache icy cliff.
(We kept thinking that if this movie had been directed by Andrew Stone, that insane stickler for realistic shooting, none of the actors would've lived to attend the premiere.)
All in all, a wondrous Guilty Pleasure......Piper Laurie, taking a break from playing Arabian Nights princesses, never looked cuter as she flings herself from a speeding car and sprints across the glacier in a skirt and high heels......(and still remains perfectly coiffed)
And in all the chaotic goings-on, there's even time for a subplot involving a Native American girl (the breathtakingly gorgeous Betta St. John) and her fugitive father.
We don't care how dumb this all sounds, we had a good old fashioned old-time movie wallow with "Dangerous Mission".......if you're partial to even the lesser films of Golden Age cinema, feel free to have a ball with this one. 3 stars (***).
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