Carretera 301

The heart sinks when Highway 301 opens as the governors of three states bore us blind with pompous crime-does-not-pay speeches, one after the other. (It was 1950, and before we had a good time we had to be morally reassured.) Luckily, things pick up quickly in this modest but very well done look at life on the lam. A gang of bank-and-payroll robbers is terrorizing North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland; its leader (Steve Cochran) is especially vicious, and seems to take particular delight in bumping off women who cross him. One of them (Virginia Grey) gets bumped off much too early, as her sassy mouth is one of the best things in the movie. Another is the French-Canadian girlfriend (Gaby Andre) of another gangster, who only slowly comes to realize that she's fallen in with a den a theives ("duh?"). The tensest sequence in the movie occurs when Cochran is stalking her, by night, in the streets of Richmond, Virginia. The concluding scene, in a hospital, is almost as good. Again, by no means a vital installment in the noir canon, but quite professional and engaging.