The Crooked Road

Robert Ryan plays an idealistic journalist who sets out to expose the corrupt Duke (Stewart Granger) of a mythical Balkan country in this low budget espionage melodrama drearily directed by Don Chaffey. The Duke is a man of means in his home country, and at first one has to wonder why Ryan goes after him after leaving incriminating evidence of the Duke's dirty dealings with a U.S newspaper editor at the film's start. However, there is a subplot involving Ryan's relationship with the Duke's wife (Nadia Gray), which causes additional complications. In the process, Ryan plays a deadly cat-and-mouse game that almost gets him killed.

In spite of good performances by the cast - Ryan and Granger are both good playing against type - this lackluster B-movie is no masterpiece, perpetrating a dull soap opera atmosphere until the dramatic final scene.

Apparently, the distributor did not have much faith in the movie, as revealed in its poster that boldly proclaimed a series of spoilers: "Bribe him, frame him, poison him, seduce him. Do what you must but stop him..." The cover of the Pan Books re-release of Morris West's novel, "The Big Story," upon which THE CROOKED ROAD was based, teased the movie as, "A breathless suspense thriller of intrigue and corruption in modern Italy," although the film was shot over a period of two weeks in Yugoslavia in 1964.

One would dearly love to play Devil's advocate and say something positive about this lamentable opus but it has alas no redeeming features whatsoever and is nothing more or less than a stinker.

For an actor of Robert Ryan's magnitude it represents the bottom of the barrel but at least he has a few decent roles still to come. As for Stewart Granger this is sadly typical of the mostly mediocre material of his post MGM career. Nadia Gray, Marius Goring and George Coulouris make up the numbers whilst one is able to put a face to the voice of King of the Dubbers, Robert Rietty, as a policeman.

The editing is simply atrocious and the whole enterprise is utterly devoid of momentum. Although director Don Chaffey is no doubt known to devotees of the Fantasy genre, he ended up where he belonged, in Television.

I had to comment on this movie- it was looking all forlorn with a grand total of '0 votes'! Well, here goes. . . I taped this film from the TV, because I'm a huge Stewart Granger fan. I have to say that I didn't keep the film! It's not the worst movie in the world but I've seen better. There's a vague suggestion of a plot that goes something like this: A reporter (Robert Ryan) arrives in a country somewhere in the Balkans and exposes the dirty dealings of it's dictator (Granger). Of course, he's eager to leave the country with this information, and the dictator's wife, who happens to fall in love with him. One of the better scenes is one where Granger 'poisons' Ryan to get him to talk then, while the latter writhes in agony, puts his feet up and reads the newspaper! There's a lot of backstabbing and skullduggery and you come away feeling more than a little disappointed. I'll stick to Granger's earlier films in future- Ryan's too, for that matter.

Richard (Robert Ryan) is an American reporter stationed in some Baltic nation that isn't communist...though the government is corrupt. He's working on a story to prove that the nation's leader, the Duke of Orgagna (Stewart Granger), is embezzling funds. But the Duke is like a cat....and in the film, he spends most of his time toying with Richard...before ultimately destroying him. First, he sets up Richard to appear to have killed a man. Second, he takes Richard to stay at his island retreat...where he plans to mostly talk and talk and talks before finally dispatching him.

While Ryan and Granger are both excellent actors (particularly Ryan), the script is far from perfect. Instead of action and suspense the film substitutes talking...and more talking. It makes for a very static story instead of an exciting or intriguing one. Overall, not bad but it sure could have been better.