Vamos, will ya!

The Big Steal 1949 RKO (72 minutes) directed by Don Siegel, written by Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring) and Gerald Drayson Adams.

This is a classic romantic comedy wrapped in a road movie inside in a film noir plot directed by Don Siegel, who went on to make Coogan’s Bluff and Dirty Harry.

The lively back-and-forth between the sexes competes with humor relating to cultural differences and language miscommunication between everyday Mexicans and their inscrutable Americano neighbors—and high speed car chases made the more hair-raising when the cars career wildly on screeching tires through tilting back projections.

The plot goes something like this:

Lieutenant Duke Halliday (Robert Mitchum) is a U.S. Army payroll officer trying to catch Jim Fiske (Patric Knowles), who fled the United States for Veracruz with a $300,000 payroll he stole from Halliday. Halliday is after Fiske to clear his name, because the Army apparently thinks Halliday stole the money himself.

The ham-handed Captain Vincent Blake (William Bendix), Halliday’s Army superior, is after Halliday, trying to recover the money that Blake thinks Halliday stole. 

Joan Graham (Jane Greer), the sweetheart Fiske jilted in Miami, also is trying to catch up with Fiske to recover $2000 she loaned him before he absconded to Veracruz. Graham has a map from Fiske which shows a route marked from Veracruz to Tehuacán, a regional town to the southwest.

None of this makes much sense under closer scrutiny, but it puts Halliday and Graham together to catch Fiske, with Blake in hot pursuit, monitored and trailed by Veracruz City’s Inspector-General Ortega (Ramon Navarro) and his deputy, Lieutenant Ruiz (Don Alvarado), who ‘let the little mouse go so that later he could follow the little mouse into a group of other little mouses—mice,’ as Ortega explains to his deputy.

Mitchum and Greer are fun to watch—apparently a bit too much fun for the Hayes Office, which made Siegel cut some of the racier parts. But Navarro, as the courtly and amused Ortega, is the film’s secret weapon.

Don Alvarado, Ramon Navarro, Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in The Big Steal

Ortega knows that some of these people are up to no good, and seems to bet that Halliday and Graham are on the level. But he watches and engages with everyone, figuring that the mystery will resolve if he allows it time to play out—and besides, it gives him ‘Such a well chance to practice my English.’