The fourth man (1952)
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The fourth man |
| Original title | Kansas City Confidential |
| Country of production | United States |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1952 |
| length | 99 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Phil Karlson |
| script |
George Bruce Harry Essex Rowland Brown (Story) Harold Greene (Story) |
| production | Edward Small |
| music | Paul Sawtell |
| camera | George E. Treble |
| cut | Buddy Small |
| occupation | |
| |
The fourth man (original title: Kansas City Confidential ) is a in black and white twisted American film noir of Phil Karlson from the year 1952nd
action
Tim Foster plans a bank robbery in Kansas City . To do this, he meets one after the other with the three criminals Pete Harris, Tony Romano and Boyd Kane to recruit them as accomplices. Since Foster hides his face behind a mask during these meetings, he remains anonymous even for the gangsters. So that the three of them cannot identify each other in the event of a later arrest, they all wear masks during the attack. The robbery goes as planned and the robbers escape undetected. Foster instructs his accomplices to hide in various places outside the country and wait there until he sends them a telegram to summon them to divide up the booty.
After the gangsters used a delivery truck with the inscription of a flower wholesaler as a getaway vehicle, Joe Rolfe, the driver of the real delivery vehicle, is arrested. Because Rolfe himself has a criminal past, the police are anything but squeamish with him during the subsequent interrogations. Although ultimately nothing can be proven to him and he is released again, Rolfe loses his job, which had meant the chance of a new beginning for him. In order to restore his ruined reputation, he sets out to find the bank robbers himself.
Through his old underworld connections, Rolfe gets on the trail of Pete Harris. He manages to track down Harris in the Mexican border town of Tijuana and extract the truth about the bank robbery from him. Since Harris has meanwhile received the expected telegram, Rolfe forces him to fly together to the scheduled meeting. When Harris is caught by the police in the departure hall and shot, Rolfe quickly slips into his role and flies himself to the meeting point, a vacation hotel in a Mexican seaside resort. There he meets the other three bank robbers.
It turns out that Foster is a bitter ex-police officer who doesn't really want to split up the loot. Rather, he intends to hand his accomplices to the police to the knife in order to collect the advertised reward of the insurance company. When it emerges that Rolfe is not who he claims to be, events roll over. In the final confrontation, Romano and Kane are shot and Foster is mortally wounded. Before he dies, Foster informs the police that he and Rolfe had convicted the gangsters and that Rolfe was therefore entitled to the reward. Rolfe doesn't have the heart to expose Foster's lie and confirms his story.
background
The fourth man opened in US cinemas on November 28, 1952. In Germany it was released in cinemas on December 29, 1953.
criticism
"Staging moderate gangster film with some rawness, which was touted as a mirror of human depravity, but never lives up to this sensational claim."
" The fourth man is one of the best film noirs of the 1950s."
Web links
- The fourth man in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward (Ed.): Film Noir. An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, Third Edition. Overlook / Duckworth, New York / Woodstock / London 1992, ISBN 978-0-87951-479-2 , pp. 149-150.
- ↑ a b The fourth man. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed April 29, 2017 .
- ^ " Kansas City Confidential is one of the best noir films of the 1950s." Geoff Mayer and Brian McDonnell: Encyclopedia of Film Noir , Greenwood Press, Westport 2007, ISBN 978-0-313-33306-4 , pp. 238-240 .