A French boxing ring and a Louisiana swamp provide the unlikely bookends to this geographically expansive but sharply introspective road movie, Melville’s first in color and his third straight collaboration with leading man Jean-Paul Belmondo. As broke former paratrooper and boxer Michel Maudet, the actor splits the difference between the mysterious volatility of his gangster in Le doulos and the unwavering moral compass of his clergyman in Léon Morin, Priest. He’s given a gruff, lumbering scene partner in an aging Charles Vanel, who plays Dieudonné Ferchaux, the tax-evading, murderous millionaire banker who hires Maudet to escort him across America as he evades authorities on the way to Panama (with any luck). Driving Ferchaux’s convertible, Maudet gradually goes about dismantling his unsavory employer’s authority once the pair leaves New York City, which in turns leads Ferchaux to slacken his harshness and eventually develop a tender paternal disposition toward his much younger bodyguard. Episodic and ambling, Magnet of Doom’s portrait of strained intergenerational bonding is paired with a melancholy travelogue of America’s bedraggled backroads that offers a template for later films like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces and Two-Lane Blacktop.