Strictly for the Vultures

The Big Gamble (20th Century-Fox) is a picture in which the central character is a truck, the story line is a dirt road, the scriptwriter (Irwin Shaw) runs out of gas, the actors (Stephen Boyd, Juliette Greco, David Wayne) have no spark, the director (Richard Fleisher) falls asleep at the wheel, and the producer (Darryl Zanuck) is going downhill. The spectator can hardly be blamed for speeding to the nearest exit.

Intended as a sort of African Queen on wheels, the film tells how a poor young Irishman (Boyd) and his Corsican bride (Greco), who despite her poverty slinks around in a little something by Maggy Rouff, run a truck full of beer through the West African bush. The plot grinds grimly from one boring breakdown to another--a roadblock, a snapped shaft, a flash flood--until the heroine, after fifty minutes of mishap, says, "Whew! I never thought we'd make it." They didn't.

Gregory Ratoff, in his last screen role--he died last December--briefly brings the show alive and, as the curtain line of his career, disgorges a magnificent Ratoffian mouthful: "You vill pe itten py ze volchers!" Otherwise, the most remarkable thing about the film is its sustained improbability. Greco looks as appropriate in a jungle as a crocodile on the Champs Elysees. The languidly sophisticated little love scenes are hardly the sort that a muscular truck driver and his lively young wife would get much satisfaction from. The landscape doesn't look African, and it isn't; almost all the outdoor scenes were shot in the south of France. Last straw: in their entire trip through what passes for unaccommodated wilderness, the lovers see exactly one poor little old lizard.

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