In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Ride the Pink Horse (1947)
  • Ronald Wilson (bio)
Ride the Pink Horse (1947)
Blu-ray and DVD distributed by the Criterion Collection, 2015

“Why don’t you ride the pink one?” says Gagin (played by Robert Montgomery) in answer to a young girl’s question as to which carousel horse to ride. The question itself might seem oddly placed in a black-and-white crime film from the 1940s, the heyday of American noir sensibility. The idea of an antique carousel as the centerpiece of a noir film also seems somehow out of place in the dark world of crime, corruption, and angst typically associated with these films. The cover art for this Criterion release of the film provides yet another anomaly by foregrounding a fedora-wearing, gun-wielding tough guy who appears misplaced in the sepia-toned Southwestern background. Universal’s Ride the Pink Horse (1947) is emblematic of postwar nonurban noir films that critiqued American culture through displaced masculine protagonists. Eagerly awaited by scholars and fans alike, Ride the Pink Horse is one of a few remaining major noir films yet to have a release on home video. The film offers an excellent example from which to explore the production, themes, and motifs that permeated noir films of the postwar period.

The central protagonist in immediate postwar noir is the returning veteran who typically finds himself in an urban environment marked by corruption, deception, danger, and alienation. Such maladjusted veterans have themselves been severely psychologically damaged by war in the form of amnesia or posttraumatic stress syndrome, which debilitates their ability to reintegrate into normal society. Films such as Somewhere in the Night (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1946), Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), and Dead Reckoning (John Cromwell, 1947), among others, showcased a distinctly different American landscape changed by the war. Here trapped and disoriented protagonists grappled with a complex, bureaucratized postwar environment. As a consequence, many noir films from the late 1940s into the early 1950s address changing social values regarding race, class, and ethnicity. It is also at this time that the nonurban noir film emerges. Here protagonists are placed in even more alienating environments, but ones that create a space for both a reformation of the conventional noir antihero and a critique of domestic social values. Ride the Pink Horse exemplifies these struggles in the form of a small Southwestern town that becomes the site of a clash of cultures, class, and ethnicity.

Ex-GI “Lucky” Gagin (Robert Montgomery) arrives in the small New Mexico town of San Pablo intending to blackmail Frank Hugo (Fred Clark), the gangster who killed his war buddy Shorty. The town is crowded with primarily white American tourists who have come for the local fiesta celebrations. In his quest to blackmail Hugo, Gagin is befriended by a Native American girl named Pilar (Wanda Hendrix) and a carousel operator named Pancho (Thomas Gomez, whose performance in a supporting role earned the first Academy Award nomination for a Hispanic actor). Gagin also attracts the attention of FBI agent Retz (Art Smith), who follows him, suspecting that he has evidence that will incriminate Hugo. After Hugo’s men beat him up, Pilar and Pancho nurse him back to health before his climactic confrontation with Hugo, which results in the latter’s downfall and the former’s reformation. The film’s [End Page 101] main focus, however, is on the marginalized figures of Gagin and the various gringos, Spanish Americans, and Native Americans whom he encounters on his quest for revenge and reformation by fellow outsiders Pilar and Pancho. Scholar and author Imogen Sara Smith analyzes the various struggles among the working (Pancho/Gagin/Retz), lower- (Pilar), and upper-class (Hugo) characters in the film in an intriguing supplemental interview included on the disc.

Robert Montgomery, who starred in and directed the film, also directed and starred in Lady in the Lake the previous year for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. That film, notable for its inventive use of the subjective camera, also marked a turning point in Montgomery’s star persona from a debonair leading man to a harder, more cynical dramatic lead. In fact, Gagin very much resembles Montgomery’s Philip Marlowe...

pdf

Share