Harold Daniels's Roadblock 1951

Considering that Harold Daniels directed only a handful of films before retreating to television the artistic success of Roadblock is a tribute to the power of the film noir genre and its icons, including star Charles McGraw, for whom it was one of his few starring roles after years of terrific tough-guy supporting roles in films such as Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946).  McGraw's role in Roadblock is Joe Peters, an insurance investigator who is starved for love and falls for Diane Morley (Joan Dixon) when Morley pretends to be Peters's wife in order to get a cheaper airline ticket.  But Diane wants nothing to do with Joe because, as she says, "I'm in the World Series and you're still in the minor leagues;"  Joe can't buy her a mink coat on his puny salary.  So Diane takes up with sleazy crook Kendall Webb (Lowell Gilmore) while Joe broods for her.  On Christmas Eve Diane is talking to a bartender who is looking forward to going home to his family and everything changes for Diane, as she rushes to Joe and says she loves him and doesn't care about mink anymore.

But it's too late; Joe, desperate for love, has already cooked up a deal with Webb to rob a train full of the insurance company's money.  Joe wants to call if off but Webb convinces him that his relationship with Diane won't last if he can't buy her what she craves.  Fate being what it is the robbery goes wrong and someone is killed.  Joe's partner  Henry Miller (Louis Jean Heydt) figures out what is happening -- Joe had his share of the money sent to him inside a fire extinguisher but Henry knew he already had an extinguisher --Joe slugs him over the head and tries to escape to Mexico with Diane via the dry storm drains of Los Angeles, but they are trapped; Joe is shot and killed and Diane walks off alone, filled with grief, down the dry riverbed.

McGraw effectively plays a vulnerable and gullible man, very different from his gangster roles. Joan Dixon plays a woman looking for the luxuries she never had as a secretary but discovers that it's not what she really wants (Dixon was a Howard Hughes discovery who only made a handful of films.) The cinematography is by Nicholas Musuraca, a master of chiaroscuro and the opressiveness of claustrophobic interiors (his best work for RKO, where Roadblock was made, was Jacques Tourneur's film noir Out of the Past, 1947).  The screenplay was by noir veterans Steve Fisher (who wrote John Cromwell's Dead Reckoning in 1947) and George Bricker (Jean Yarbrough's Inside Job, 1946)