****SPOILERS**** Richard Conte is recently honorably discharged US Marine Jim Henry who's on the run from the police and state troopers, in both Nevada & California, for a murder that he didn't commit. It's this floozy that Jim got friendly in a Vages casino the drunk and abusive Terry Smith, Mary Beth Hughes, who he's suspected of murdering by strangling her with a dog collar. Could the woman have been involved in an S&M session that went horribly wrong? Well anyway with no witness to his being innocent of this horrible crime with his only witness to his innocence being an old Marine buddy working undercover, thus not using his real name, for the government it's no surprise that Jim flew the coop ending up a fugitive from the law.It's while on the run in the Nevada Desert that Jim got hooked up with fashion photographer Mrs. Cummings, Joan Bennett, and her teenage model Susan Willis, Wanda Hendrix, who gave him a lift. Even though Susan was nuts about the handsome ex-marine Mrs. Cummings have reservations about him. And although the entire movie a determined Mrs. Cummings tried to not just turn him over to the police, she knew he was wanted for murder, but do her best to kill him, like in a car accident, herself.It's not until the by now lovers Jim & Susan were tracked down by the police lead by Det. Let. Joe White Eagle, obviously a native American, played Reed Hadley that the whole truth came out in not only Jim's innocence but the reason Mrs. Cummings wanted to shut him up, by murdering him, permanently! The film's ending at Jim's place in his almost underwater home, with a swimming pool in each room, situated on the edge of the Salton Sea has the truth finally come out or surface to who killed the late Terry Smith and the reasons why. It was quite obviously from the start who Terry's murderer was in that all the evidence, from her killer's own mouth, pointed to him or her. As the film went on the killer in knowing that Jim by proving his innocence will expose him he did everything in his power to shut him up by murdering him. This not only tipped off Jim to who he was but also the police including Chief Det. Let. Joe White Eagle who Terry's murderer also tried to do in.

Highway Dragnet (1954)Wow is this an up and down production. Most of it is rather good, with a handful of supporting actors around the dependable leading role played by Richard Conte. And the plot is solid if a little familiar. Conte, a returned G.I. from Korea, is falsely accused of killing a girl in Las Vegas. And to save himself he has to resort to extreme measures, like escaping from the local cops and more or less kidnapping a couple of attractive women along the way.One of the highlights is the range of location shooting. Foremost, briefly, is Las Vegas, circa 1954. It will blow your mind. It's worth watching the first fifteen minutes alone. Then there are lots of desert scenes leading to a grand finale at the Salton Sea, which was famously flooded. This is amazing stuff, buildings have submerged, and a wide open landscape with hardly a car or house. And the interaction between Conte and the two women is good if somewhat predictable (one of them falls in love with him, the other wants to kill him). There is even the beginning of a photo shoot at a country motel, with a couple of Graflex cameras shown nicely. It all has a curious low budget tension.But the tension is often resolved or delayed by a sudden bit of luck. Just when Conte is going to get caught, the phone rings, or that kind of thing. And then the ending, which I can't give away, but ugh. It had huge potential, and was going great overall, until this preposterous scene where a confession is shouted over the waves. So, take the lumps with the cream here. It's a short, fast, enjoyable movie overall.

This film is a real treat to watch due to the many absurdities that abound from scene to scene. After a shouting match in a barroom with a buxom over-the-hill blonde ex-model, Richard Conte, finds himself hitch- hiking to the Salton Sea where his house is rapidly disappearing from the rising shoreline! He's picked up by the police, who claim he murdered aforementioned blonde bombshell. Before you can blink an eye Conte's outta there and shooting holes in a classic Kaiser patrol car. He escapes in an old Nash which he abandons upon seeing Joan Bennett(wearing a dress made out of a parachute) and Wanda Hendrix trying to fix a broken-down sedan. He fixes things up while Joan's pooch becomes roadkill. Any 10 year-old has figured out the films outcome at this point. Conte becomes "Mr. Leash", the crazed killer, who gets a whole resort full of vacationers running for their lives. Conte, Joan and Wanda do everything but roast marshmellows over a desert campfire before Joan teaches them both how to do the "Twist" in an improbable puddle of quicksand near Conte's rapidly decaying, drowning dreamhome in the Salton Sea. This movie has a lot of unintentional laughs in it. A great bad movie.

In a Las Vegas casino, just-demobbed Marine (Richard Conte), buying a drink for a case-hardened platinum blonde (Mary Beth Hughes), inadvertently insults her; they have a public spat but kiss and make up, also publicly. Next day he's picked up by the sheriff as the prime suspect in her death by strangulation. He overpowers his captors and sets out on the lam.Since an all-points bulletin has troopers checking the highways and the state border, he takes up with a couple of women with car trouble. There's a high-profile fashion photographer from New york (the redoubtable Joan Bennett, who helped shape the noir cycle in two early Fritz Lang films); with her is her callow young assistant (Wanda Hendrix). Despite their attempts to ditch him, he sticks with them, ultimately by force, on his journey to the California desert, where he grew up.Highway Dragnet's title pretty much sums it up: It's a road-chase movie in the fast, flat 50s style, but with a good pulse and a perverse twist or two (alert viewers will pick up on a giveaway clue right after the dog becomes road kill). It also features the other kind of trouper in the person of Iris Adrian, doing what she did better than anybody else: the hash-slinger with a mouth on her.But the pedestrian, late-noir style undercuts what might have been the film's final showpiece: a final reckoning in Conte's old homestead, under knee-deep water from the floods of the Salton Sea. This strange metaphorical setting gets taken for granted; this was a time when the evocative imagery of earlier film noir had ceded primacy to the literalness of plot.