This may be the least sentimental film I can think of. Mitchum himself is seen as a petty hood way out of his league, and comes the closest to eliciting a modicum of sympathy from us. But everyone else is utterly unlikeable, Peter Boyle as a bartender and mob functionary, Stephen Keats as a gun runner, and particularly Richard Jordan as an ice cold undercover cop ("Have a nice day").
Mitchum is a desperate gun mule trying to work both sides of the fence by being an informer on the people he's working for. He's such a loser that his information is always too late to do him any good. Keats buys guns from army thieves and sells them to anybody--very cautiously (nice scene where he faces down one of his customers, a female "revolutionary" Weatherman type in a VW bus looking to buy machine guns). A secondary plot involving a bank stickup has the thieves covering themselves in eerie translucent masks that were state-of-the-art in costume stores then.
Real grit. "Pulp Fiction" without the pulp fiction. And Mitchum's Bahstin accent is right on.
Mitchum is a desperate gun mule trying to work both sides of the fence by being an informer on the people he's working for. He's such a loser that his information is always too late to do him any good. Keats buys guns from army thieves and sells them to anybody--very cautiously (nice scene where he faces down one of his customers, a female "revolutionary" Weatherman type in a VW bus looking to buy machine guns). A secondary plot involving a bank stickup has the thieves covering themselves in eerie translucent masks that were state-of-the-art in costume stores then.
Real grit. "Pulp Fiction" without the pulp fiction. And Mitchum's Bahstin accent is right on.