Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Ketrivie It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

Roy Hart If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

Yash Wade Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

JasparLamarCrabb Fans of Robert Montgomery's performances in such lighter fare as HERE COMES MR. JORDAN or MR & MRS SMITH will likely be stunned by his work in this hard-nosed, decidedly kinky film noir set in a seedy New Mexico border town. Montgomery comes to town looking to blackmail the underworld boss who had his friend killed. The fact that the underworld boss is played by Fred Clark(!) gives a good indication that this thriller is going to be anything but typical Hollywood fare. Montgomery directed with a deft touch and he's populated the film with a stellar ing cast including a very young Wanda Hendrix, Andrea King as a bitchy gun moll and Art Smith as a very Truman- like government man (it's 1947!). Stealing the film is Thomas Gomez as Pancho, Montgomery's sleazy sidekick and owner of the carousel featuring the eponymous horse. Clark is exceptional in his unlikely role, a wolf in sheep's clothing with a hearing aid and a hidden temper. Ben Hecht worked on the script and the excellent art direction is by Robert Boyle & Bernard Herzbrun. Montgomery would later adapt the same story on his television anthology show in which both he & Gomez would reprise their roles.

chaos-rampant Weird, off-beat, and dark even by noir standards, RIDE THE PINK HORSE is the definite cultish item, a film of some other order that happens the way it does either by accident/inexperience on the filmmaker's part or from some kind of intuitive design, a basic way of saying "everyone makes films this way but what if I take out these little parts and see how it works". Knowing that Robert Montgomery helmed LADY IN THE LAKE, a Raymond Chandler adaptation shot entirely from Marlowe's POV seemingly for novelty's sake, doing something for the simple pleasure of finding out how it turns out, I'm inclined to think it's the second, with the first factoring somewhere in the process. For all Montgomery knew the result could've been a muddled incoherent mess. But it's not.For some reason, it's mysterious and elusive, oddly captivating and dreamlike even when it doesn't make a whole lot of sense (or perhaps because of it), because the characters are left incomplete and indecipherable, the way real people are most of the time, doing what they do out of some sense of personal obligation or skewed honor they can't even explain to themselves. Hollywood usually explains that motivation and in doing so turnes characters into plot devices created to move the story forward or halt it long enough for the necessary exposition to fill the gaps. Montgomery instead opens the film with his protagonist, a disillusioned former GI turned blackmailer, wandering around in a small New Mexican town the day before a fiesta and doesn't bother explaining why's there or what's he there to do until we're a good 20 minutes in.In the meantime, the movie has soaked up enough eerie smalltown atmosphere and a sense of impending doom, grinning Mexicans giving the protagonist false directions to his hotel and a weird wideyed girl giving him strange charms to ward off bad luck, that when the plot kicks into motion we've established so much mood that the story need not be anything more than a basic skeleton. The second half is not as great as the first because the potboilerish noir aspects take hold, something about a typical blackmail scheme and characters trying to outwit and deceive each other as they're wont to do when the film noir is their natural habitat while a government agent stalks in the perimeters trying to arrest the victim of the blackmail for the same crime he's being blackmailed, but thankfully it's not for too long.Soon we get dingy Mexican taverns and the fiesta pouring through the streets and a crane shot that rises to meet the ghastly Zozobra figure towering above the town; we get a great set piece in a merry-go-round from which the movie takes its bizarre title, stabbings in the back of restaurants, our knifed protagonist staggering in the dark around town automaton-like to god knows where, the government agent showing up at just the right time to bail him out or tell him things he needs to be wary off like a deus ex machina or a Campbellian mentor, rumbling monologues against flag-waving and working 9 to 5 that reveal a movie as disillusioned with the postwar American dream as its own characters, all these wrapped in a structure that has an odd mystical/mythic quality about it.And of course, we get Pancho, the merry-go-round owner, and his pearls of wisdom such as "when you're young, everyone sticks knife in you" (which I someone had as his sig here). A true delight for the cult movie aficionado and the film noir fan who always cared more for BLAST OF SILENCE than THE MALTESE FALCON. Great stuff.

steveg-37 For me this movie is a fine example of the exotic "Old West" or "Old Mexico" of the '30s-'40s east coast imagination.It has an ambiance similar to a Roy Rogers movie where the gangsters drive cars and fly airplanes, but Roy on Trigger is able to ride over the hill and cut them off. Business suits mix with cowboy outfits and Mexican girls in traditional dresses.To correct some of the other reviewers, the fictitious San Pablo of the movie is actually Santa Fe--the La Fonda Hotel is a historic landmark near the main square of Santa Fe. Cowboys and Indians and lots of Americans in the on screen Fiesta are not that out-of-character after all because it is not actually in Mexico.That said, the movie has an enigmatic, exotic, mysterious feel which is sustained throughout. The fact that you don't know much about the characters contributes to the enigma.I liked all the actors, especially Thomas Gomez, and feel that the film has many glimpses of Mexican-Americans depicted more as actual people and less as comic-book caricatures than in other movies from the same period.

SHAWFAN I saw this film when I was a young boy when it first came out in 1947 but didn't truly appreciate it till I saw it on TCM the other night again. I agree with all your commentators as to its enigmatic mystery and its possible shortfalls attributable to Montgomery vis a vis Bogart. I found the dialogue and the monologues gripping. In later looking this movie up here I discovered why: the script was by Ben Hecht (of Front Page fame). No wonder it was so great. As many of your commentators point out (and very perceptively too) the individual performances of Gomez, Hendrix, Clark, etc. were all splendid, not to forget Montgomery himself. But TCM must have edited the film or else I fell asleep watching it: I definitely did not see Gomez being beaten up by anyone while being watched by uncomprehending children. That part was definitely not in the version that I watched, sad to say. One of the strongest parts of the film was the disillusionment and cynicism expressed by the Montgomery character against patriotism, and WWII and its profiteers in typical film-noir fashion. Also strikingly evocative and disturbing was the final scene in which the innocent-appearing and ive Hendrix character finally opens up to her friends and re-enacts the events of the film in a vivacious and cynical way to show her friends how sophisticated she is after all. What a dash of cold water in the face of those who expected a romantic ending between two such repressed characters who made a specialty out of never showing their emotions. A great, great movie.