Roadblock: Harold Daniels

I doubt if Harold Daniels' Roadblock, the story of a straight-laced insurance investigator named Joe Peters (Charles McGraw) who abandons his principles and organizes a massive robbery so he can financially support his new wife, could have ever been a "good" movie. Daniels' direction was too bland and Nicholas Musuraca's cinematography too static, too bland, and too one-dimensional for Roadblock to have been anything other than mediocre. But what kills this film is how unbelievable the characters act and how quickly they change allegiances at the drop of a hat. The film takes great pains to establish how devoted Peters is to justice and the law. Concurrently, the film emphasizes how his eventual wife Diane (Joan Dixon) is originally a money-hungry cynic who would sooner drop a man than a pay-off. And yet by the second act both Peters and Diane have inexplicably become completely different people: Peters hardly thinks twice before deciding to organize the heist and Diane sheds her femme fatale exterior to become a devoted wife who is vocally content with poverty for the sake of love. The heart and soul of film noir isn't the actual character changes or betrayals, but the pain, suffering, and agony that the characters undergo either during their transformations or while they are still trying to decide whether or not to go through with it. Roadblock contains neither. If it had, the film could have joined the ranks of other sincere yet unfortunately incompetent film noir like Lady in the Lake (1947) and I, the Jury (1953).

4/10