Customer Reviews

Trapped

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This mediocre B film noir was released by Eagle Lion production company barely a year after their 1948 smash hit "T-Men". Like the very similar "Port of New York" (-also released by Eagle Lion), it was really a ripoff of "T-Men" and lacked the style, creativity, and excitement that made "T-Men" a classic. "Trapped" was directed by Richard Fleischer, who was well-suited for making low-budget noirs such as "Follow Me Quietly" (1949), "Armored Car Robbery" (1950), "The Narrow Margin" (1952), and "Violent Saturday" (1955).

A young Lloyd Bridges stars as Tris Stewart, a convicted counterfeiter who is offered a chance at early release from prison if he agrees to cooperate with Treasury agents who're trying to track down his former partners-in-crime. He reluctantly agrees to help them but as soon as he's alone with an agent he knocks him out and makes his escape. What he didn't count on was that the agents had already anticipated such an event and they follow him closely, knowing that he'll unwittingly lead them to his counterfeiting ring members. While enjoying his shortlived freedom, he finds his former girlfriend Laurie Fredericks, aka Meg Dixon (Barbara Payton, in her film debut) and they reignite their fiery relationship.

Laurie has no problems with Stewart's dangerous lifestyle, and when she learns of the agents following him closely she tries to warn him, but it proves to be too late. But recapturing Tris is only the beginning for the determined Agent John Downey (John Hoyt), who then sets out to capture his murderous counterfeiting gang. In this movie the T-Men, just like the Canadian Mounties, "always get their man", and the movie's ending is totally predictable and unexciting. It was supposedly based on the same true case that inspired Anthony Mann's classic "T-Men", but the sluggish pace and lack of excitement kept this movie from being a classic B noir.

The movie is worth watching once maybe, just to see luscious Barbara Payton in her impressive debut. Payton, who's real name was Barbara Lee Redfield, appeared in barely over a dozen movies and had her peak in Hollywood in 1950's "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye" with James Cagney. Her career came spiraling downward following several scandalous affairs (many with married men) and a violent battle between Franchot Tone and Tom Neal, who nearly fought to the death over Barbara. She faded into obscurity and eventually became an alcoholic prostitute, dying at the age of 39 on May 8, 1967. As for Lloyd Bridges, he was good playing another bad guy but he just didn't get enough screen time to make this a memorable performance. As for the Alpha dvd, it has an acceptable picture and sound quality. Overall, recommended only for hardcore film noir buffs.

A young Lloyd Bridges shines in an otherwise plodding and routinely told story of an escaped convict on the hunt for forged treasury notes plates. For those who like their tough-guy movies to be filled with corrupt officials, be warned. TRAPPED starts out with a pseudo-documentary look at your Treasury Department and goes on to depict the T-Men as flawless through the rest of the movie.
Bridges' performance is probably worth the price of admission. He plays a soft-spoken, gum-chewing thug with not quite enough street smarts to realize how close the government men are on his trail. There's also a good, movie capping chase scene in a trolley yard.
The print quality is almost uniformly bad, and some scenes blur in and out of focus. Most annoying is something that happens at about the mid point of the movie: At the end of a grainy scene the large words "Video Calibration" appear in the middle of the screen and remain there for about 5 seconds. It makes you wonder if these companies even LOOK at these disks before selling them to the public.

Trapped is a pretty good movie I think. Lloyd Bridges plays his role well. An escaped, tough con on the run and trying to make one last big score so he and his girlfriend can go to Mexico. Barbera Payton is his girlfriend and man is she a hottie!

The movie starts off with a quick high school type lecture on how money is made and all the other responsibilities of the US Treasury. After that we learn of the evils and perils of counterfitting.

The feds discover a resurgance of counterfit money that had Lloyd locked away. They make a deal with him for early parole if he helps the feds catch the new counterfeiters and recovet the plates.

But Lloyd has other plans. What ensues is a cat and mouse game between the feds and the counterfeiters. When the undercover agent gets his cover blown, the fun really begins.

This is one of those great old flicks that would probably be a blockbuster if it was remade.

Topnotch quality picture and sound in this DVD film noir,Trapped.Good performances by Lloyd Bridges,John Hoyt and Barbara Payton( She really can act)

Lloyd Bridges was a stage actor who had been kicking around Hollywood since 1936 and had an established reputation as a rock solid actor--but even after a decade of work he still hadn't acheived front-rank stardom, and it would be another decade before he found his true calling in television. Barbara Payton was something else again, a beautiful blonde with a sultry voice who was in fact a runaway wife and mother who began as a model and after two bit parts suddenly jumped to co-star status alongside Bridges in the 1949 TRAPPED, a low-rent tale of Treasury agents on the track of counterfiters.

Bridges was expert and reliable, but Payton was the real deal, a woman on the fast track for major stardom. TRAPPED was just a stepping stone, and within a year she was deemed such a significant talent that she was cast opposite none other than superstar James Cagney in KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE, a film for which she received spectacular reviews. But this would actually be the peak of her career. She was indeed beautiful and talented, but she was also incredibly unstable, and after a series of affairs with everybody from Howard Hughes to Bob Hope, she crashed and burned in a sea of booze and scandal, and reduced to scraping by on grade-D movies like BRIDE OF THE GORILLA. By 1955 her film career was over, and she became a street prostitute turning tricks for five dollars a pop. She resurfaced when a john cut her stomach open with a knife, and parlayed the incident into a ghost-written autobiography, I AM NOT ASHAMED, but nothing could pull her back from the gutter depths to which she had sunk. She died in 1967 at the age of thirty nine, probably as much from sheer exhaustion as from liver disease.

It's a bit hard to believe Bridges as a gangster, but his performance is more than adequate; John Hoyt as Agent John Downey also rises to the occasion. But the real reason to watch TRAPPED is to see what all the fuss was about over Barbara Payton, and she doesn't disappoint. Jailed counterfiter Bridges agrees to help the treasurery department track down his old gang in exchange for early parole, but he pulls an escape as soon as he is on the outside and makes a bee-line for girlfriend Payton. Little does he know that his escape has been anticipated and is part of the treasurery agent's plan, who goes into hot pursuit, and in the process discovers that Payton is every bit as tough--and maybe tougher--than her boyfriend. Needless to say, however, everything ends the way you expect, and indeed there is nothing original about the film at any point.

The DVD is released by Alpha, and like most Alpha products it is sloppy. The picture is jittery, the sound is weak. Add to this a commonplace script and nondescript direction and you haven't got anything much. Except, as I have said, Barbara Payton. She soon became a byword for Hollywood disaster, but at the time of this film she was talented, a knock-out, and well worth a look. Recommended on that basis alone.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer

Directed by Richard Fleischer (Fantastic Voyage, Conan the Destroyer, and Red Sonja) Trapped (1950) is a grade B noir that at times contains impressive stylistic imagery and dialogue, but overall falls short of being a true "underground" B noir classic. For a succint, yet revealing synopsis of the film read the review by Dave. My comments are directed toward a few scenes that detract from the effective realism that exists in other exemplarary noir films. First a stunt double is clearly used for John Hoyt, who portrays the undercover Secret Service agent Hackett in the fight scene between him and Tris (Lloyd Bridges). Later in the film, Hackett, his face showing no effects from the vicious rumble, meets with Mr. Sylvester to arrange another meeting. Wouldn't Mr. Sylvester notice Hackett's facial renmants of his brutal fight? It is worth mentioning here that the three fight scenes in the film are realistically directed and acted. It was pleasing to view a 1950's film fight that did not end with a character being knocked out with one punch. (Why did George Raft, James Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart so often look like boxing champions on the screen?) Other shortcomings of the film were the car scenes. A moving background screen is clearly evident behind the stationary studio vehicle-too cheesy. Why is Tris, who is a prison inmate in his opening scene, not dressed in prison garb? The film's finale also shows amateurish camera work, when the pursuers seem to jump to "fast-motion" when startled by Mr. Sylvester's buzzer blunder. Trapped does not contain the moral struggle that challenges the protagionist in many classic noir films. Instead viewers are introduced to a cold-hearted crimminal, Tris , who Lloyd Bridges plays to the hilt. John Hoyt plays the undercover Secret Service agent who we find is the one that is really trapped. In conclusion, the opening scenes of the film with a narrative of the powers of the U.S.Treasury is well documentated.

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of `Trapped.'" That's Hamlet, part-time movie critic for the Elsinore Herald-Gazette, writing his review after watching this reverential dud. Trapped instructs us on the excellence of the U. S. Treasury Department's Secret Service, as its agents track down the near-perfect plates for bogus $20 bills, now starting to show up in circulation. The man who made the plates, Tris Stewart (Lloyd Bridges) is in prison, so he can't be the mastermind. Someone, Mr. Big, has those plates and is starting to use them. The Treasury Department works a deal with Stewart. They'll spring him from prison and make it look like a jailbreak. In return, he'll track down his former partner and find out who's responsible for the new stuff. Stewart, however, has a different idea. He'll go along with the phony jail break, but he plans to hook up with his old girl friend, Meg Dixon (Barbara Payton), cut a deal of his own with Mr. Big, then vamoose to Mexico with Meg and as much money, good or bad, that he can fool everyone out of. Only two things stand in his way. First are the shrewd, brave and dedicated men (there are no women in the movie except Payton) of the United States Treasury. Second is the shrewd, brave and dedicated Secret Service agent John Downey (John Hoyt).

Trapped is one of those documentary-seeming paeans to the government that Hollywood produced in the late Forties. For the FBI, it was The House on 92nd Street and The Street With No Name. With Trapped, we're given a seven-minute civics lesson on the many praise-worthy activities of the U. S. Treasury, with an emphasis on the reprehensible nature of counterfeiting, At the end of this stentorian, no-nonsense, deeply respectful narration honoring our government at work, I nearly wrote a check to add to my income tax payment.

The real problem with Trapped, however, is that it is dull, with journeyman direction and acting. There are one or two solid scenes, including a tough fist fight in a shadowy hotel room and a chase and shootout in the huge shed housing dozens of Los Angeles' electrified streetcars. In between is just one dull scene after another as Stewart tracks down Mr. Big and the Secret Service stays on Stewart's tail. The Secret Service may be always one step ahead of Stewart, but for most of the movie, once we catch on to how good Hollywood is going to make the Secret Service, not much suspense is left.

This was one of the first movies Richard Fleischer directed. He had a long, successful career that wasn't particularly distinguished. On the one hand he gave us such interesting or pleasurable movies as The Narrow Margin, Fantastic Voyage, 10 Rillington Place and Soylent Green. But then we have things such as Doctor Doolittle, Mandingo and The Jazz Singer.

Poignantly, we can see Barbara Payton and reflect on the lives, if they're unlucky, of lush, blonde, shallow starlets. She managed a handful of movies working with the likes of Gregory Peck, James Cagney and Gary Cooper. Within a couple of years she was enmeshed in scandal. She didn't seem to mind along as she was talked about. Another year or two and her career was over, which seemed to puzzle her. Payton's life was a sad, sordid melodrama, finishing at the age of 39 after alcoholism, public drunkenness and arrests for heroin and prostitution. She loved the attention Hollywood gives starlets, but she had little talent other than her curves.

Trapped is in the public domain. My version doesn't look so hot.