Movies : Crime : DVD Rip : English
Despite its title, Western Pacific Agent is a contemporary crime melodrama. Kent Taylor stars as a railroad detective, assigned to track down an elusive robber-murderer. The audience knows from the outset who the culprit is (hotheaded Mickey Knox, who delivers an astonishingly vicious performance), but the plot requires the detective to methodically piece together the evidence before making his final move. Helping him solve the crime is the sister (Sheila Ryan) of a slain paymaster (Robert Lowery). The whole story is narrated in flashback by an uncredited Jason Robards Sr. One of the most brutal films of its era, Western Pacific Agent spares the audience nothing: at one point, the villain beats up his own father!
Western Pacific Agent is another terrific little "B." Train buffs will love the fact that it's book-ended with scenes shot aboard a real train, possibly on the Feather River Route. The interior shots of the double-decker observation car are fascinating. In flashback we hear tell of a railroad agent, Rod Kendall (Kent Taylor), investigating the murder of a paymaster (Robert Lowery) and a bridge operator.
At first it looks like most of the film is going to take place aboard the train, but it turns out to be more of a character portrait of the murderer, Frank Wickens (Mickey Knox), a bitter young man riding the rails who blows into his hometown only to hit up his old man (Morris Carnovsky), a widower shopkeeper, for some dough. When he can't spend the stolen money on account of the well-documented serial numbers, he carries it around hidden in his bedroll, but that only hangs over him like the Sword of Damocles. By the end of the film you almost feel sorry for this desperate, doomed hood.
Directed by busy Sam Newfield, Western Pacific Railroad is a real crackerjack of a movie with an exciting shoot-out climax, first at an isolated shack (with enough gunfire to rival The Gauntlet) and at the bascule bridge where it all started. Even the comedy relief from Lippert player Sid Melton is pretty funny. (He grows on you.)
Knox, unnervingly convincing as a ruthless drifter in this, had a long career in Italian films in the '60s and '70s, including a long association with director Sergio Leone. Later, Woody Harrelson's loathsome character in Natural Born Killers was named after Knox; I wonder if Oliver Stone saw Western Pacific Agent?
