Watch Violent Road For Free

Memorable, crazy movie

Excellent but underrated film

Admirable film.

The acting in this movie is really good.

***SPOILERS*** Remake of the 1953 spine tingling French action film "Wages of Fear" the film "Violent Road" has a pumped up with his python like muscles bursting in every direction, where later in the film he's forced to take his shirt off before it rips apart, Brian Keith as maverick trucker Mitch Barton. Barton is hired by Cyclone Rocket Company boss Mr. Nelson, Ed Prentiss, to drive a three truck convoy of dangerous and explosive rocket flue components across the desert to a new place where the company is re-located.Offered $5,000.00 for their work Barton doesn't have any trouble finding volunteers to drive the truck cross country through dangerous side road, thus avoiding population centers, to their destination. One of the truck drivers is the spaced out and guilt ridden George Lawrence played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr. It's Lawrence who's in fact responsible for the fiery death of his entire family, as well as hundreds others, when a rocket that he had launched at the Cyclone Rocket Launch Center smashed into a nearby town killing everyone in it!The tense and dangerous ride has many short falls for Barton and his half dozen drivers where one of them the washed out and alcoholic US Marine Frank "Sarge" Miller, Dick Foran, loses his life trying to plug a valve that's leaking out dangerous chemicals in his truck. It's the last ten or so minutes when the action in the movie becomes almost unbearable to watch! With time and fuel running out Barton makes the choice to go all out and damn the toreadors or truck load of dangerous chemicals to make it to home base, the new Cyclone Rocket Plant, before the sun goes down. ***SPOILERS*** Predictable ending, if you saw either the movies "Wages of Fear" or it's later , after "Violent Road", re-make the 1977 thriller "Sorcerer" in the final outcome of the ride into and out of hell by Mitch Barton & Co. But It's the final few minutes in the movie that were far more uplifting then in the two other far more superior films about the same subject.

The Violent Road casts Brian Keith taking on a really hazardous trip, transporting three components of rocket fuel, any one of them could reek havoc of some kind if it is jarred. Making it worse Keith has to travel over an abandoned road with little traffic that is rocky. It's like traveling with nitroglycerin with triple the risk.The place storing the stuff has to move because a military rocket experiment went horribly wrong and crashed into the town causing death and destruction. Keith also has to pick five other men willing to make the risk. One is picked for him, Efrem Zimbalist, Jr. who is a scientist and knows how to handle the fuel.The other four are Sean Garrison, Perry Lopez, Arthur Batanides and Dick Foran. Foran's portrayal is a poignant one. A former Marine who was mandatory retired he can't get used to it. He just drinks all day and bores the young Marines at the bar that Keith finds him. Foran's scenes with wife Ann Doran are truly touching.The Violent Road is a nice no frills B picture from Warner Brothers, the kind that used to fill the second bill on a program. Now that stuff would be found on television and shortly Keith and Zimbalist would be seen there often.

While I can't say I prefer this film to either Wages of Fear or Sorcerer, I agree that it is pretty enjoyable. Some of the wisecracks and banter are pure 1950's hard-boiled pulp, and Brian Keith has never been better as a certain type of swaggering man's man particular to that Era."Walker would shrink his own mother's head for a dollar.""I'm not allergic to a buck, either." "You pull a stunt like that again I'll rub yer head in the sand til its hamburger!" While all of this is certainly amusing in a time capsule kind of way, the film itself plays like the storyboards to a much more tension-filled film. Compared to the trials and tribulations undergone by the doomed men in both Wages of Fear and Sorcerer, the journey in Violent Road is rather muted. But still, an enjoyable way to spend an hour and twenty eight minutes.

Brian Keith, with his patented wry and cynical wit, is perfectly cast to lead the heavy truck convoy of desperate men hauling explosive cargo in a race against time. This is a plot similar to "The Wages Of Fear (1954) and "Sorcerer" (1975), so it couldn't help but be a nailbiter if done well...and it is. But the script resists the temptation to lay down wall-to-wall action in favor of good character development through flashbacks, a well-used device but an effective one. Leith Stevens provides a good music score, even accompanying a trucker as he drives along singing "Breezin' Along With The Breeze" (before the inevitable problems begin, naturally). Violent Road was filmed near Lone Pine, California, with plenty of shots of crumbling cliffs, laboring diesel engines, spinning tires...all the neat stuff that cinema-action fans like, but with enough celluloid devoted to getting us to know the men behind the steering wheels and why they wanted the job to begin with. Recommended for all.