World for Ransom
With Dan Duryea, Gene Lockhart, Patric Knowles.
US, 1954, 16mm, black & white, 81 min.
Though shadowed by an unflattering reputation as a quickie spinoff of the TV series China Smith and further afflicted by Aldrich’s non-credit, World for Ransom is nonetheless an early testament to its director’s budding visual imagination and thematic preoccupations. In a fog-enshrouded backlot simulacrum of Singapore, Dan Duryea plays a weary private eye whose former girlfriend—now a saucy nightclub crooner in an opium district—employs him for a convoluted job involving kidnapping and hydrogen bombs. With its nuclear paranoia and unfurling layers of intrigue, the plot is Kiss Me Deadly tryout material, as is the formulation of the hero as a bumbling and exhausted interloper (though here it is the melancholy of lost love, not consuming apathy, that hangs thick in the air). Despite the limitations of his resources and material, Aldrich brings every ounce of his compositional savvy to emphasize the story’s nervous emotional undercurrents—whether top-loading his 4:3 frames with imposing ceilings, scattering his sets with single-source lighting from odd angles, or cramping his characters within cluttered furniture.
