Golden Salamander

“I own this town. I own these people. You’re on my territory.” Featuring the only wild boar hunt in all of noir, Ronald Neame’s Golden Salamander, the director’s follow-up to his excellent Take My Life (1947), is an exotic adventure noir involving Etruscan artefacts, a gun running syndicate, a whirlwind romance, and a flock of slow-moving mountain goats. Trevor Howard stars as British archaeologist David Redfern, who’s been sent to Tunisia to catalog museum artifacts but soon finds himself entangled with a gun smuggling gang and targeted for assassination by gang henchman Rankl (the outstanding Herbert Lom). Along the way, Redfern falls in love with the much younger Anna (Anouk Aimée), whose brother Max (Jacques Sernas) may be somehow involved with the syndicate. With its first act depicting Redfern’s arrival at a remote inn during a chaotic thunderstorm, the film establishes an intimidating setting (cavernous museum lobby, dark storage cellar, exotic musical instruments and tones) but later introduces a romantic subplot (which some may find uncredible) that transplants the action to a paradisiacal seashore and sand dunes and an extended escape and chase scene across a rocky, desert landscape that seems to dip into western genre territory.