Plot Synopsis (continued)
Prejudiced
and acting on a hunch (his "game leg"), Quinlan walks with
a huge limp to the Mexican side with other officers - his first visit
in years. His investigation is an excuse to visit the strip joint
where Linnekar picked up the blonde striptease dancer - his murdered
companion. A sign lights up the front of the strip joint: "20
Sizzling Strippers." By this time, Vargas has also returned
to Susan, finding her in the lobby of their Mexican hotel. Out on
the street, Quinlan makes a racist comment on the ethnicity of Vargas'
blonde, fair wife after seeing her for the first time through the
hotel's front window: "She don't look Mexican either." To protect Susan's safety
while he assists in the investigations, Vargas suggests sending Susan
ahead to Mexico City, where he'll soon go for the Grandi drug trial.
Susan is visibly upset and sarcastically describes his devotion to
duties: "Of course, even on his honeymoon, the chairman of the
Pan-American Narcotics Commission has a sacred duty to perform."
Vargas leaves the hotel and runs to catch up to the
other police detectives in a shadowy alley. One of Grandi's young
gang members named Risto (Lalo Rios) (the son of Vic, the
Grandi leader "in the pen") attacks him with a bottle
of acid and then runs off. The chemical misses its mark on Vargas's
face, exploding instead with a smoky hiss on a peeling poster on
the crumbling wall behind him of the victim dancer named Zita. Her
portrait is singed with acid (an echo of her death in the burning
car explosion). In the strip joint, the Rancho Grande (a play on
the name "Grandi"),
Quinlan while munching on a candy bar, has a few words with the madam/owner
(Zsa Zsa Gabor) ("She only joined the show a few days ago"), while
the other officers are attracted to the women.
The detectives leave the modern strip joint and reluctantly
say farewell to the prostitutes, following Quinlan out its back door
entrance. They find themselves in a wind-drifted, paper-strewn street.
There, Quinlan, still munching his candy bar, is attracted (and weakened)
by the tinkling sound of a pianola coming from a familiar, local
brothel run by his old love and former mistress, Tanya. Glassy-eyed,
he mumbles to himself: "Tanya, still open for business?"
As he disappears onto the brothel's veranda as a newspaper blows past
his head (and an oil derrick rises behind him), the other detectives
question Quinlan's interest in the old-world whore of the bordello:
Schwartz: I don't know what Quinlan thinks she's
got to do with it.
Adair: Tanya? Oh, maybe she'll cook chili for him, or, uh, bring
out the crystal ball.
With a starry gaze and childlike wistfulness, Quinlan
walks into the tawdry bordello's parlor, filled with aging articles,
stuffed animals, a mounted bull's head on the wall, and Victorian
bric-a-brac from the past. In a memorable entrance, the raven-haired,
mystical fortune-teller Tanya (Marlene Dietrich), a wise and worldly
gypsy madam, appears from a doorway, smoking a small cigar and blowing
clouds of smoke. She doesn't recognize him ("you're a mess")
under his layers of fat, and speaks in a Germanic-tinged baritone,
delivering the first of many drop-dead lines:
Tanya: We're closed.
Quinlan: You've been cookin' at this hour?
Tanya: Just cleanin' up.
Quinlan: Have you forgotten your old friend, hmm?
Tanya: I told you we were closed.
Quinlan: I'm Hank Quinlan.
Tanya: I didn't recognize you. You should lay off those candy
bars.
Quinlan: Uh, it's either the candy or the hooch. I must say, I
wish it was your chili I was gettin' fat on. Anyway, you're sure
lookin' good.
Tanya: You're a mess, honey.
Quinlan: Yeah. That pianola sure brings back memories.
Tanya: The customers go for it - it's so old, it's new. We got the
television too. We run movies. What can I offer you?
Quinlan asks her about the bombing incident and if
she had heard anything about it. She replies succinctly: "I
heard the explosion." He later suggests inviting himself back
after investigating the explosion: "Well, when this case is
over, I'll come around some night and sample some of your chili."
She doubts he is up to it: "Better be careful. Maybe too hot for
you."
Quinlan is summoned to the front door and told by Menzies
that Vargas experienced
"some trouble," although Vargas believes the acid attack
is unrelated to the bombing affair. Quinlan's "intuition" tells
him it is associated with the Grandi case, since "Vargas and his
Keystone Cops" have recently given the Grandi family problems.
Under an oil derrick in a conversation filled with
overlapping dialogue, Vargas challenges Quinlan's intuition a second
time, asking him about Susan's accosting in the street by "Uncle
Joe" Grandi's gang. Prejudiced, Quinlan clashes with Vargas,
insinuating that his charges are blown out of proportion while also
criticizing typical "police procedures" in Mexico. When
the district attorney characterizes Quinlan as a "born lawyer,"
Quinlan expresses his angry annoyance at the shortsightedness of attorneys,
while Vargas admits that he hates his job ("there are plenty of
soldiers who don't like war"):
Quinlan: I'm no lawyer. All a lawyer cares about
is the law.
Vargas: Captain, you are a policeman, aren't you?
Quinlan: Hmm, hmm. Aren't you? You don't seem very positive about
the job.
Vargas: There are plenty of soldiers who don't like war. It's a dirty
job, enforcing the law, but it's what we're supposed to be doing,
isn't it?
Quinlan: I don't know about you, when a murderer's loose, I'm supposed
to catch him. (He is filmed from below to emphasize the weightyness
of his pronouncement.)
Vargas returns to his Mexican honeymoon St. Marks Hotel
to rendezvous with his wife. The camera swings upward and from right
to left from Vargas at ground level to an open second floor window
across from his hotel. A phallic-like spotlight of a flashlight probes
and peeps at Susan [a symbol of sexual violence] in her darkened
room across the way as she undresses and removes her sweater. After
rushing to cover herself with the sweater and turn on the light in
the room, she scares a pigeon from the ledge of her hotel window
as she leans out and yells: "See
any better this way?" When the peeping tom nephew of Grandi's
gang continues to pester and annoy her by shining the bright light
at her and blinding her, she unscrews and throws the room's only
light bulb at the intruder just as her husband enters their pitch-black
room - too late to be helpful.
In the early morning hours out on the street, Uncle
Joe Grandi dashes after nephew Risto who threw acid at Vargas. He
slaps the young thug, forcing him to respect him as the "boss" now
that the boy's old man Vic is "in the pen":
Until he gets out, who's running this outfit?...Oh,
what a set-up to work with! One brother in jail, two others dead,
and nobody left to carry on the business for the bunch of nephews.
Grandi loses his wig or "rug" as they squabble
together.
Mike and Susan walk down the stairs to the hotel lobby,
as Mike tells her about tensions and dangers in a border zone (and
symbolically in their marriage):
This isn't the real Mexico. You know that. All border
towns bring out the worst in a country. I can just imagine your
mother's face if she could see our honeymoon hotel.
Grandi tells his nephew that he is worried about the
fate of his brother in the penitentiary if anything happens to Vargas: "And
if Vargas gets hurt, what happens? My brother Vic is just as good
as convicted. You leave Vargas to me."
While Susan waits for Mike in the hotel lobby as dawn
approaches, she tells one of Grandi's boys through the window: "I
don't want any more postcards."
She goes outside to be handed a note: "A souvenir with a million
kisses, Pancho."
The note is attached to the polaroid picture recently taken of her
with Pancho in front of the Ritz Hotel. Although she threatens her
husband with leaving for the airport and immediately traveling to Mexico
City, she decides to "stick close to" her husband, suggesting
that she should stay in a safer, more comfortable motel "on the
American side of the border." Vargas, who hasn't yet proved himself
to her, feels both ethnically and psychologically defensive: "I
suppose it would be nice for a man in my place to be able to think
he could look after his own wife in his own country."
While adjusting his lopsided "rug" in his
car's rear-view mirror, Grandi plans to terrorize and frame Vargas'
pretty wife in a sex/drug crime - to force him to withdraw from his
brother's case:
We're gonna get him where it really hurts and without
laying a hand on him. He's got a reputation. He's got a young bride.
He's gonna leave this town wishing he and that wife of his had
never been born.
Meanwhile for safety's sake, Susan is taken part way
by Vargas to the Mirador Motel in Texas, a place suggested by Quinlan
so that she can get some rest. (Mike is unaware that the motel -
a dumpy, remote desert motel - is owned by Grandi who is clearly
part of the plot against him.) Along the way as Vargas drives her
near the "open
border" of "1400 miles without a single machine gun in
place" between Mexico and the US, she becomes very affectionate
with her husband. With her arms around his neck, she sweetly asks: "You
don't mind, do you darling, if we just sit here by this terribly
historic border of yours maybe for about a month?" A honking
police car with flashing lights appears and breaks up their affection.
Susan switches cars and is taken the rest of the way by Menzies.
Vargas is taken off with Quinlan to assist in the car
bombing case - Menzies realizes that Quinlan has forgotten his cane as his police
car speeds away. [His forgetfulness ultimately dooms him.] He explains
how his heroic boss came to need a cane for his bad leg - when he
stopped a bullet for him:
He got it in a gun fight...He was wounded stopping
a bullet that was meant for me.
Meanwhile, Menzies takes Susan to the roadside motel,
noticing that they have been followed by Grandi's convertible. [Note:
Grandi mistakenly follows because he thinks that Vargas is driving
off with Susan.] Menzies stops the tail, forces Grandi to abandon
his car, arrests him, and takes him back to town. Susan
is dropped off and left alone at the Mirador Motel at "just
past seven" in the morning. The isolated and mostly-deserted
motel is managed by a skinny, bizarre, sex-crazed, nervous, hyperkinetic,
beetle-like, immature night attendant (Dennis Weaver). When the spectacled
receptionist first sees her, he is peeping through her motel window.
He confronts her in her room, darting, dashing, and jerking around, bringing
the sheets to make up the bed. He becomes overly panicky and clings to
the wall when she mentions the word "bed": "It's past
seven and I haven't been to bed yet." Because there is no "day
man" and he is the "night man,"
he becomes even more squirrelly and jittery when she asks him to help
her make the bed. He scurries outside and sticks his head through her
open window to speak to her:
Attendant: That, that friend of yours, Mr. Grandi,
he, he ain't gonna leave you here for long. (He winks.)
Susan: He is not my friend.
Attendant: He, he brought you here in that, that car, didn't he?
Susan: No, he didn't. As a matter of fact, he's under arrest.
Attendant: Under arrest? Mr. Grandi? (He laughs and then quickly
steps away)
Susan: Yes he is.
Vargas and other officers drive
to the Linnekar Construction Company site where it is suspected that
the dynamite for the car explosion originated. The foreman (Billy
House) is asked questions about former young Mexican employee Manolo
Sanchez (Victor Millan) and
some stolen dynamite, and informs Quinlan: "He's
been playin' around with the boss' daughter." The police radio
alerts them that Sanchez is already a "suspect now in custody" in
Sanchez' own apartment - where the dead man's daughter Marcia Linnekar
has been living for four months during an ongoing affair. Quinlan
has an intuitive hunch that Manolo Sanchez, now a shoe clerk, is
his suspect. Vargas joins Quinlan
and a team of police investigators, including Quinlan's faithful
but twitchy "pardner" Pete
Menzies, at Sanchez' apartment.
There, in a lengthy interrogation scene (with another
long single take, often unnoticed) in Sanchez' tiny, cramped, claustrophobic "shoe-box
size" apartment (where Marcia has also been
living for four months), the nervous young murder-suspect is
given the "third degree." Everyone
talks at once in the overlapping dialogue. Marcia is permitted to
leave (unquestioned) with her expensive lawyer Howard Frantz (William
Tannen), after Quinlan speculates that she "had a little quarrel
with (her) dad and moved out on (her) own" to live with Sanchez.
However, Marcia's boyfriend remains behind to be questioned in the "third-degree" without
benefit of counsel.
Quinlan is impatient with the Spanish-speaking suspect
- and with Vargas who attempts to translate for him (but is suspected
that he may be offering assistance):
Quinlan: I don't speak Mexican...Let's keep it in
English, Vargas.
Vargas: That's alright with me. I'm sure he's just as unpleasant
in any language.
Sanchez: Unpleasant? Strange? I've been told I have a very winning
personality. The very best shoe clerk the store ever had.
Quinlan: You weren't workin' as a shoe clerk out in that construction
crew...
Quinlan impulsively slaps Sanchez across the face to
intimidate him and quiet him. When Vargas knocks a shoebox onto the
floor in the bathroom as he washes up his hands, he notices it is
empty. Then, from the living room where the police are questioning
Sanchez (he first met Marcia while she was purchasing shoes at the
store and has "been at her feet ever since" - and seems
to be a "fortune hunter"), a punch to the stomach and a
low moan are heard. Vargas tells one of the US detectives named Al
Schwartz (Mort Mills) that although Sanchez is "unpleasant,"
"he could even be innocent, you know...Why not? Quinlan doesn't
have a monopoly on hunches."
Quinlan wonders how Sanchez can afford such an apartment:
Quinlan: It's quite an apartment, for a shoe clerk.
And who pays for it? Marcia?
Sanchez: What if she does?
Quinlan: How long has this been goin' on, huh?
He learns that Sanchez was fired from his last job
(at the construction site) working for Linnekar, and believes that
Linnekar objected to having a "Mexican shoe clerk for a son-in-law." Quinlan
comments on Sanchez' probable motive for murder,
but Vargas pushes for more evidence "to put him on the scene
of the crime":
Quinlan: Naturally, you had to put him [Linnekar]
out of the way...Just because he speaks a little guilty, that don't
make him innocent, you know.
Vargas: If you can show motive, yes, but don't you need a bit more
than that?
Quinlan: Oh, we'll get it. Oh, there's my coffee. Didn't you bring
me any donuts or sweet rolls?
Vargas: You'll have to put him on the scene of the crime.
Quinlan: We will.
Schwartz: You've got to have some evidence.
Quinlan: We'll get it.
While the investigation and interrogation is carried
on, Vargas walks across the street to phone his wife at the Mirador
Motel to check on her condition. [Note: The uninterrupted shot in
Sanchez' apartment breaks for this telephone scene interlude.] Vargas
uses the phone of a blind woman shop owner, and curiously turns his
back on her so she won't know what he is saying to his wife on the
phone. Behind his head on the wall hangs a sign:
If you are mean enough to steal from the blind,
help yourself.
During their phone conversation, Susan, a glamorous
and seductive woman, is reclining on her motel bed in sexy, silky
lingerie. Their call is brief, but he does tell her "how very
very much" he loves her. He hangs up on her before they finish
talking (the unnverving blind woman eavesdrops and possibly fantasizes
about the loving words he whispers to his wife). Once the call ends,
Susan calls the front desk asking to not be disturbed since she plans
to sleep, and is told that she is the hotel's only guest. She is
unaware that the phone in the Manager's Office is answered by Pancho
- who ominously assures her: "Nobody's going to get through to you
unless I say so."
Soon after his phone call, Vargas returns to Sanchez'
apartment, [as another long shot commences], where Manolo sarcastically
worries that he is going to be framed for Linnekar's murder: "Sure,
I'm the fortune hunter who hypnotized Marcia, who made her kill her
father for his money. If I had that kind of power, I wouldn't be
where I am today, believe me." He also states how Marcia was the
one who was pursuing him and he couldn't resist her: "Well, instead
of the man chasing the girl, suppose she was the one. Suppose she
asked him to marry her. What should he do? Draw himself up and say,
'No, my dear, you and I could never be happy together because
of your money.'" Vargas cautions Manolo about treating the harsh
accusations as a "joke."
During their chatting in the living room, Quinlan is
in the back room out of sight. He suddenly appears and asks Menzies
to search in the bedroom and bathroom, claiming that he is too tired.
Shortly later, off-screen in the apartment's bathroom, Menzies is
heard proudly announcing his discovery of the evidence linking Sanchez
to the bombing - two sticks of dynamite ("I found it!"). Quinlan
accuses Menzies of murdering Linnekar so that Marcia (and he) would
inherit her father's fortune: ("Poor Rudy Linnekar. He did all he
could to keep you away from his daughter. But she stands to inherit
a million bucks, so naturally you just moved in here"); Sanchez also
admits that the two had been secretly married:
Menzies (to Vargas): Well, Hank has done it again.
He's nailed his man.
Quinlan: Thanks to you, pardner.
Menzies: Me? If that dynamite had been a snake there in the bathroom,
it would have bit me.
Quinlan (to Vargas): ...This is it, we've broken the case. Rudy Linnekar
was, uh, blown up with eight sticks of dynamite and, uh, Sanchez
stole ten. That leaves two and we've found 'em both. You heard that
boy. We found the dynamite.
Sanchez: That's impossible.
Quinlan: We found two sticks.
Sanchez: ...Where did you find this?
Quinlan: Right here in your love nest.
Sanchez: Where?
Menzies: Where you had it stashed, of course.
Sanchez: What are you trying to do?
Quinlan: We're trying to strap you to the electric chair, boy.
Menzies: We don't like it when innocent people are blown to jelly
in our town.
Quinlan tells Sanchez that he must pay for his awful
crime:
Quinlan: There's an old lady on Main Street last
night picked up a shoe. The shoe had a foot in it. We're going
to make you pay for that mess.
Sanchez: (He pleads in Spanish with Vargas.)
Vargas: You'll have to stop him yourself...
Quinlan (overlapping their lines): He can talk Hindu for all I care.
Sanchez is taken away to be booked at the station.
Vargas is shown that the incriminating evidence was found in a shoebox
in the bathroom. Astonished, he immediately realizes that the boy
has been framed and that Quinlan has planted the evidence to conclusively
implicate his suspect in the murders. When he tells Quinlan the shoebox
was empty ten minutes earlier, Quinlan interprets his story: "You
people are touchy. It's only human you want to come to the defense
of your fellow countryman." Vargas, a man of integrity and truth,
threatens to expose Quinlan to authorities - determined to clear
the innocent man and expose the detective's corrupt methods:
You framed that boy. FRAMED him!
Rattled, Quinlan raises his cane between them to strike
Vargas, but he holds back. Vargas drives off with Schwartz to plot
Quinlan's downfall. Quinlan fears the consequences of their challenge: "Listen,
I got a position in this town, a reputation...somebody's gonna be
ruined."
Quinlan temporarily befriends Grandi, now that they
both have similar intentions to corral Vargas. Grandi tells Quinlan:
We are both after the same exact thing, Captain. If Vargas goes on like
this, shooting his face off...Somebody's reputation has got to be
ruined. Why shouldn't it be Vargas's?
Arm in arm, Grandi leads Quinlan away to discuss
how they will intimidate and embarrass Vargas - to force him to drop
his case against Quinlan. As a church bell tolls, Grandi suggests
going "somewhere nice and private, huh, where we can sit down and have a drink." Quinlan
retorts: "I don't drink," as an abandoned Menzies stares
at them from a window as they walk away, their figures reflected in
the window glass. The scene dissolves into another window reflection
of cars arriving at the Mirador Motel.
Susan raises a window shade at the motel to reveal
her face, obliterating the window's reflection of the desert landscape
from outside. Although Vargas believes Susan is safe at the motel,
she is quick to be victimized and persecuted. In the sequences of
Susan's terrifying experiences with the juvenile gang - tough, leather-jacketed
Mexican hotrodders including 'Pancho' - they first harrass her by
playing loud rock 'n' roll through the concentric loudspeaker/intercom
on the wall so that she can't sleep. Then, they take over the office
switchboard, cut off her phone calls, and terrorize the night attendant.
Meanwhile, Vargas begins an investigation of his own,
determined to show how Quinlan planted the dynamite. The camera films
them careening at high speed through the town's streets - the perspective
is through the windshield with the scenery behind them moving rapidly
away. Plotting how to capitalize on Quinlan's weaknesses with Schwartz,
Vargas considers examining dynamite purchase records and searching
Quinlan's Texas ranch.
The night attendant at the motel realizes that the
black-jacketed group that has commandered the motel office and switchboard
are sons of Grandi - sent there by Grandi - under Quinlan's orders. |