As only with Dwan, we are in medias res in a couple of minutes. A man called Eddie Candell escapes from a death convoy to San Quentin; he is non-descript in appearance but not without importance, as this self-made man built an economic empire that was robbed while he was in prison – a modern success story topped by a still more modern one in a world run by ever dirtier hands. The successful people, Eddie’s followers, are plain crooks whose own ideas wouldn’t accomplish a thing – they can only steal, murder and destroy. Official society, starting with the police, completes the grim view; their faces in this lucid film are almost like the personification of the  military-industrial complex that was to become Eisenhower’s nightmare vision in his farewell speech, in 1961. So Eddie is first framed and will soon have killed a man, almost like an automaton, nicely assisted by those who want to finish him off – which means everybody, from the officials to criminals (if they can be separated). He doesn’t choose to become a killer but clearly he is not sympathetic or harmless either; he’s armed and dangerous, but of course a small fish compared to those after him. Except in what Eddie becomes materially: he is shellshocked by radiation and becomes invincible: he might be dead already (perhaps there are echoes of the strange Michael Curtiz-Boris Karloff collaboration called The Walking Dead) so weapons don’t hurt him; he’s just a pathetic guinea-pig in the service of progress. His 48-hour walk toward death takes place in anonymous offices or in the desert, the best in modern film. What would become a set for Antonioni is here burning, concrete, crushing reality – a soulscape. Eddie is the kind of trapped nondescript non-person that Dwan understands so well; he even had a special type of actor, almost non-actors, perform those roles in the final (and arguably greatest) part of his career: John Payne, Ronald Reagan, here a guy called Ron Randell whose name doesn’t ring a bell from any other film. His face – as with the heroes of Edgar Ulmer’s films – is perfect for a man who seems to have walked among us from the realm of death, presenting a last look at earth and its present inhabitants and encountering a not very consoling view. The vision has an erotic tension also, as it happens in Slightly Scarlet or River’s Edge. Eddie stands between two women – a sweet Elaine Stewart and the more threatening gangster moll Debra Paget who promises: “I will make you the same..”, answered memorably by the man: “Can you make me flesh and blood again?” The strange finale caps Eddie’s  trapped life with an enormous explosion and fire storm where our non-person simply explodes. He survives as dust amid nuclear dust, alienated by and distanced from other people, dangerous to them and himself. His touching post-mortem is also director Allan Dwan’s farewell. This might be the most amazing postscript to a fabulous film career – a film with no sympathy whatsoever for society, coming from an optimistic man who directed hundreds of films with touching confidence about the integrity of citizens.

Peter von Bagh