World for Ransom

With his second feature film, Aldrich also proved himself as an independent producer: On the sets of the television series "China Smith", which he directed, he used breaks in filming to shoot a dirt-cheap noir adventure with the show’s star, Dan Duryea, and his future regular crew—a film that feels like a sketch for greater things to come: Private detective Mike Callahan is hired in Singapore by his former lover to tail her husband, who is involved in the kidnapping of a nuclear scientist. "World for Ransom" anticipates the nuclear fears and Cold War paranoia of "Kiss Me Deadly" and showcases Aldrich’s visual ambitions within the framework of an Arte Povera-style existentialism: The pseudo-exotic atmosphere has a touch of Josef von Sternberg, traversed by the first pair of ambivalent Aldrich antagonists. "World for Ransom" “embodied for the first time what I wanted to express in films,” according to Aldrich. (C.H.)