Split Second (1953) That's right, boys and girls......another A-Bomb detonation is imminent, so get ready to save yourselves by keeping your head down and diving under the nearest desk or table......
Or so we Baby Boomers were told as our Government and military, giddy with their atomic toys, constantly set off A-Bombs into the atmosphere......because....uh....because they could. And oh boy did those towering mushroom clouds look awesome.....
Years later, we realized what they should have told us to do is bow our little heads between our legs and kiss our asses goodbye....
Meanwhile, Hollywood studios, smelling big box office moola in Da Bomb, responded mostly with cheapie sci-fi horrors about radiation-spawned mutated creatures running amuck. (1954's brilliant "Them!" forever set the template for this genre....)
But a year before "Them!" crooner, turned actor-director Dick Powell slapped together this mean 'n lean little atomic blaster for RKO Radio Pictures. No mutants in sight, unless you count ruthless escaped convict Sam Hurley (Stephen McNally, a B-movie toiler making the very most of his showy role.)
Amidst the Nevada desert landscapes, Sam's on the lam with a flunky (conveniently named Dummy (Fran DeKova) and suffering best bud Bart (Paul Kelly) who's nursing a slug in his gut from a botched robbery. Their master plan - temporarily hang out in an old abandoned mining town that sits only a mile away from the latest A-Bomb test....due to go kaboom the next morning. .
Well, nobody said these guys were the sharpest tools in the shed........
More of Sam's stupidity follows, taking a whole variety of innocents hostage.....a newsguy (Keith Andes), a broke (and broken) blonde floozy (Jan Sterling), a haughty, fur-clad diva (Alexis Smith) and her feckless dopey lover (Robert Paige). Diva and Dopey were on their way to Reno, for a quickie divorce from Diva's kindly doctor hubby (Richard Egan),
Before the violent, cold-hearted Sam drags this bunch to the A-Bomb ghost town, he calls Kindly Doc, warning him to drive over, join the party to help poor Bart or he'll perforate the Diva.....(whom the Kindly Doc still feels for)
And so the entire bunch assemble at the soon to be nuked old town, along with its only resident Asa , a grizzled old prospector (beloved character actor Arthur Hunnicutt, only 43 at the time but already doing ancient and grizzled.)
In true noir fashion, high tension feverish melodramatics erupt all over the place,,, ,including Sam puttin' the moves on both Floozy and Diva. But in the interests of top-secret movie security, I don't dare reveal who dies and who survives......but let's just say that nothing beats an atomic bomb for quickly sorting members of an ensemble cast ....one way or the other,,,,,
As previously pointed out, the hulking, loud, and aggressive McNally dominates the movie.....given the plumb prize playing a trigger-happy, hot-tempered thug who's apt shoot anybody at anytime (and often does), he seizes the day with bravura work. It's a toss up as to what's scarier....McNally's Sam or Da Bomb.
And Hunnicutt continues to build his growing reputation as a reliable scene stealer.......as Kindly Doc operates on bleeding Bart, Hunnicutt's ole Asa recalls his frontier days when he had to remove a guy's lung with a broken bottle. ("Made 'im cut back on smokin'" though".....)
For all lovers of long forgotten, underappreciated 1950's gems, don't waste a split second if you come across "Split Second", a truly explosive (heh, heh) 5 star (*****) FIND OF FINDS. (Hint: you can snag your very own Warner Archive DVD copy for only 8 bucks and change....but no guarantee on how many are left.....)
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