Diamond Smuggling Out Of Paramount

Rope Of Sand (1949) is a Wallis Siren Alert

Fun Movie and Career Opportunity For One Ticket

Burt Lancaster's heaving chest precedes him into a nest of diamonds, plus trouble with sadist commandant Paul Henried and manufactured temptress Corinne Calvet. She was handiwork of producer Hal Wallis, who shipped Calvet over (from France), put her in a few of his pics, loaned her freely, and used her for a mattress. That was reality of Hollywood, and to her credit, Calvet's memoir spared neither herself or Wallis. Whatever the price she paid, no one before postwar cameras got such luminous treatment as afforded Calvet here, so why is she so forgot, even by film mavens? I stood in no line whatever to meet her at a 90's Burbank autograph show, and she was gracious as a fan could hope. Hal Wallis called his book Starmaker, but he, like others who claimed such distinction (Howard Hawks among directors), was only fitfully successful at creating celebrity. Mostly what Wallis did with Rope of Sand was pillage his own Casablanca from loftier days at Warners, cheeriest thread of this Rope being reunion of Claude Rains, Peter Lorre, and Henried to put in mind famed North African address. Rope of Sand is sheer unrepentant and starkly overplayed melodrama that I've revered since NBC's broadcast on 3/17/69 primetime. For stops-pulled character clash and heated within-the-Code passions, there's few of the period to surpass Rope of Sand, happily available on Blu-Ray from Olive.