This isn't an exceptional film, but it's a nice little "noirish" picture (it has a good femme fatale, anyway, in Janice Carter) with Glenn Ford as a hard-luck mining engineer (yeah) who rides into a town with no brakes on his truck and soon finds himself in an elaborate setup involving the VP of a local bank (Barry Sullivan). Along the way, he befriends another hard-luck guy, a local miner who's just found a lode of silver (Barry Sullivan).The setup itself is a bit too convenient, too transparent, and we never really believe Ford is going to fall for it. There are scenes where the screenwriter's inventions are laughably inadequate, such as Ford's big discovery of Sullivan's and Carter's tryst via an embroidered robe hanging in the bathroom.Carter is excellent in the film and I wonder why she did not get more attention from audiences and directors.The film does not aim for much, but it's a great bottom of the program picture with a couple good scenes for Ford and Carter.

FRAMED starts out with a bang, with Glenn Ford trying to steer a speeding truck with no brakes to its destination, but gradually it started to lose me as it sped along into increasingly illogical plot turns. Janis Carter plays the least appealing femme fatale I've ever seen in a film noir. (In any lineup of great ladies of film noir, her name has never come up.) Here she's plotting with her lover, a married banker (Barry Sullivan), to fake his death, retrieve the money he's embezzled, and head off to happier climes. But they need a patsy with no ties to substitute for the banker. And that's where Ford, a mining engineer looking for work, comes in. We're supposed to believe Ms. Carter can entice Ford, but he never displays anything but rank hostility in her presence. When he finally kisses her, it's more of a physical assault than an act of lust. When it comes to carrying out the death-faking part, they enact a scene straight out of DOUBLE INDEMNITY. The plan they adopt is so poorly thought out that even the most cursory police investigation would see through it. Ford at least is punchy and irritable throughout, a side of him I've never quite seen before. He glares with the best of them and passes out drunk a couple of times. He's nice to Edgar Buchanan, though. And who wouldn't be? As silly as the proceedings get, it's never too predictable and moves at a fast clip throughout. This is low-end film noir, a far cry from James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, but still worth recording off TCM and watching once. Barry Sullivan (whose centennial is tomorrow, August 29) plays a solid citizen with a corrupt core, a long way from the rugged western heroes he'd portray ten years later (e.g. FORTY GUNS), but closer to the antagonists he'd specialize in playing on TV dramas in the 1960s and '70s.

Glenn Ford, young and brittle, plays an unemployed, hard-drinking mining engineer saved from ten days in the hoosegow by a blonde waitress with evil in her eyes; turns out she and her partner need a fall guy once they swindle the local banker. Crosses and double-crosses in a mostly predictable vein, though just about saved by excellent directorial touches and intriguing noir detail (the wrench in the backseat, the poisoned cup of coffee). Ford isn't really convincing playing drunk and reckless--and it doesn't sit well with us having him cast as the possible dupe--yet he cuts a solid presence on the screen and the picture would be nothing without him. ** from ****

Janis Carter boasted a largely undistinguished filmography from the 1940s but she deserved (as so many of her female peers from this era did) better parts and greater exposure. As the scheming and duplicitous Paula Craig, she personifies the cool blonde bombshell (while her line readings are a wee bit stilted, her body language is instinctive and sensational). She's the spider into whose web drifts Glenn Ford, an out-of-work mining engineer with a bit of an alcohol problem who's looking for a break. Meanwhile, Carter's on the lookout for her embezzling boyfriend's lookalike, to furnish a warm body to provide a charred corpse. This is James M. Cain territory, and, though we've been through it with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred McMurray and with Lana Turner and John Garfield, this effort by Carter and Ford deserves more prominence; its writing, direction and cinematography are all well above average. One unique moment: a banner head in the local newspaper lets us know that one of the characters has been charged with murder, but just below it, in the mock-up, is the smaller headline "Meteorite lands near baby." I think they made that movie, too, about 10 years later.