Heaven with a Barbed Wire Fence

Marking the screen debuts of both Glenn Ford and Richard Conte (here Nicolas Conte), HEAVEN WITH A BARBED WIRE FENCE was one of seven films helmed for 20th Century Fox by actor turned director Ricardo Cortez, brother of cinematographer Stanley Cortez. A gently rambling road movie, HEAVEN WITH A BARBED WIRE FENCE follows an optimistic dreamer who quits his department store job to travel impatiently West, by thumb and by rail, to Arizona where a plot of land he purchased by mail waits to be transformed into a farm. Along the way he befriends Conte’s garrulous drifter and, more unexpectedly, a Spanish Civil War exile played by serial-starlet Jean Rogers, with beloved handlebar moustached character actor Raymond Walburn tagging along as an absent-minded professor lending a comic accent to the spontaneous group dialogue. Much of the pleasure of the film lies, in fact, in those scenes of the unlikely group bonding in freight cars and besides hobo camp fires, sharing their dreams and musings on life on the road. But darker forces also gather around the edges of the film, with specters of Dust Bowl poverty and cruel accidents threatening to shatter the travelers’ hopes for bucolic and greener pastures. (Haden Guest)

With PERSONS IN HIDING