INFERNO
US, 1953, 83 minutes, Colour.
Robert Ryan, Rhonda Fleming, William Lundigan, Larry Keating, Henry Hull, Carl Betz.
Directed by Roy Ward Baker.
Inferno is a familiar melodrama – with a strong cast. Robert Ryan is a tycoon who suffers a broken leg and is abandoned by his wife and her lover (Rhonda Fleming and William Lundigan). The inferno is the desert where the businessman is left. The film is about amoral people – with a final touch of conscience.
The novelty of the film is that it was filmed in the 3D process. Direction is by British Roy Ward Baker who had made interesting films in Britain including The October Man, spent a few years in Hollywood (Don’t Bother to Knock with Marilyn Monroe) but returned to Britain for A Night to Remember and The One That Got Away. In his later years he directed a number of genre films, including horror films.
1. How good a thriller was this? Its use of thriller conventions and characters?
2. The significance of the title? Its realism? Hell and its overtones? Guilt, judgement and damnation? As applied to each of the characters?
3. Comment on the use of location photography, heat and atmosphere, colour and the desert. Was it significant that the film was made originally in 3D?
4. Comment on the effectiveness of the film structure: the beginning in the inferno and the ending in the inferno? The irony of the changing of positions? The voiceover commentary of Carson? The intercutting of Carson and Geraldine? Thematic intercutting? Duncan dying in the house burning?
5. How was Carson the central character? As he was described by his friends, his wife and enemy? What kind of man was he in fact? A rich and hard man with inferiority? A man who wanted to survive? The motivation of vengeance? His exhilaration in surviving, his will to live and will to move, the willingness to suffer? The purging of his vengeance? The changing of his life and the image of self importance? How did audience sympathy grow for Carson? How convincing a character was he?
6. How strongly withdrawn were Duncan and Geraldine in comparison? Their presentation as conventional lovers and plotters? The competency of their plan? The irony of its going wrong? Their capacity for evil and selfishness? Geraldine's not wanting to kill Carson directly? The irony of Duncan's death? Geraldine's going to prison?
7.The importance of the lawyer, the prospector, the police in the film, the comment that they made on Carson and his importance, the prospector saving Carson?
8.How well drawn was this basic human situation: love, lust, survival, power, appearances and reality, truth and lies, money and power, the value of life?
9. How was the film an allegory of human behaviour?
10. How important and valuable were various incidents in the film: Carson's finding water. his finding food, shooting the rabbit and its being taken by the coyote, the pool, the animals in the desert, climbing the cliffs, making the smoke?
11. Was the finale too melodramatic, especially the burning house and its inferno?
12. The value of this kind of thriller? Enjoyment? Violent action? A probing of values? A background of American politics, wealth and attitudes to life?
