Pun Salad

This movie is enjoyable if you approach it in a film-student mode: looking for techniques, interesting performances, behind-the-scenes trivia, etc. There's the famous uncut opening scene. A hey-isn't-that cameo by Joseph Cotten. Zsa Zsa Gabor! Marlene Dietrich! A really weird performance by Dennis Weaver! Charleton Heston plays a Mexican detective! Orson Welles is fat and sweaty! Overlapping dialogue!

Considered as a plain old movie, it's just OK.

It's set in a town straddling the US-Mexico border; one fateful night, a time bomb is placed in a car carrying a rich old American and his girlfriend-for-the-night. It crosses from Mexico into the US, passes nearby Mike Vargas (Mr. Heston) and his new bride Susie (Janet Leigh), and blows up.

Whodunit? Even though we eventually find out, that's not the main plot. Orson Welles plays Hank Quinlan, a cop who has become accustomed to doing his job using all kinds of foul play: coerced confessions, planted evidence, perjury, etc. Vargas becomes more interested in pursuing Quinlan than in nailing the mad bomber.

One funny thing I noticed: Dennis Weaver's character has a number of lines of the form: "If they think X, they got another think coming." The subtitler diligently records every one as "…got another thing coming." A common blunder.