Eddie's outro (delivered more robotically than usual--a shadow on the teleprompter, perhaps?) asks us to vote on whether the film is "awful trash" or "really fun trash." Neither option is particularly accurate, given the presence of cinematographer Carl Guthrie, who channels his inner Ted McCord and delivers some bravura visuals in a series of highly different settings, leaving things on a gloriously grim high note with a superbly choreographed final chase scene through the modernist wet dream of a sprawling south Los Angeles junkyard. (Our subject line is a bit of a spoiler, but it's probably too obscure to be truly objectionable...)
Gary wants us to think that the film points ahead to neo-noir, seeing John Russell's mastermind character as a link to future ice-cold characters. It's more realistic to see HELL BOUND as a film whose flabby script and inconsistent acting is held together by Russell's monomania and the sterling camera work of Guthrie. It follows the form of the heist films that were beginning to proliferate in the looming twilight of the American noir cycle, touching on motifs found in contemporaneous films such as THE KILLING (1956), THE BIG CAPER (1957) and THE BURGLAR (1957).
A lot of attention was paid by Eddie (in this "one for the boys" episode) on lissome June Blair, whose entry into Russell's heist plot becomes the first of several sticking points undermining the scheme's viability. Blair is adequate playing a role that really makes no sense (the moll of a mob bankroller is going to go soft in the middle of a situation she insisted on being part of?) but the moments in the film where she displays a semi-feral need to remove her shoes (shorthand for sexual arousal) are a reminder that the film is not signaling the dawn of neo-noir so much as it is telegraphing the emerging sexual explicitness that would soon reign after the demise of the Production Code. (Eddie, going "boy's club" all the way, even released some mildly risque PLAYBOY shots of Miss Blair--the magazine's centerfold in January 1957--on Twitter after the screening.)
HELL BOUND reminds us that shaky stories can be held together by cinematography/editing, by inspired location scouting, and by a strong performance from the lead actor. The film has a bountiful variety of first-rate visuals, and has an excellent "flow quotient" (evoking an engaged response from the viewer when seen with the sound off). It doesn't send itself up, so it's not "fun trash," and it's clearly not awful: it's simply the among the very last "B" films in the classic noir cycle that is valiant enough at hiding its weaknesses to warrant a big screen showcase.
But don't wait for that--you can watch it for free on YouTube, for as long as it remains available (which presumably won't be very long):
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