Calcutta

The major studios tapped into audiences’ postwar fascination with exotic, foreign locations in the late 1940’s, releasing often mild noirs with geographical titles like Tangier (1946), Singapore (1947), and this one, John Farrow’s Calcutta, which stars Alan Ladd as a charter pilot who stumbles into a criminal syndicate in a role and story remarkably similar to his work in Leslie Fenton’s inferior Saigon released the same year, which was Ladd’s fourth (and disappointing) pairing with Veronica Lake. (Both films feature nearly identical emergency landing scenes in the first act.) Written and produced by the prolific Seton I. Miller, Calcutta combines the Indian city’s gritty crowds with the Paramount gloss of the Hotel Imperial, the residence of pilot Neale Gordon (Ladd) and his buddies Pedro Blake (William Bendix) and Bill Cunningham (John Whitney) who together fly a route between Calcutta and Chungking, China. After Bill ends up strangled to death one night, Gordon leaps at the chance to investigate the circumstances, which seem to involve a secret smuggling racket and Cunningham’s new fiancé Virginia Moore (Gail Russell) whom he had just recently met. Quickly smitten by Virginia in Cunningham’s absence, Gordon has also been singing Marina Tanev (June Duprev), who performs sexily on stage at a nightclub managed by the duplicitous Eric Lasser (Lowell Gilmore). Ladd delivers a pleasingly standard Ladd performance, while Russell’s ethereal beauty and softness makes her status as femme fatale unclear. (Edith King is also excellent as mysterious jewelry merchant Mrs. Smith.) Visually, noir lighting adds atmospheres to quite a few scenes, notably Gordon’s searching for the loot in the plane at night when he’s attacked from behind.