Plunder Road

A night of heavy rain. Five men hold up a train and get away with ten million dollars in gold bullion. The load weighs nine tons and will not fit in one vehicle. The plan accounts for that: split the gold across three trucks and drive to Los Angeles by separate routes. Nobody hurries, nobody draws attention. The film follows what comes next almost in silence: checkpoints, filling stations, small things going wrong along the road. The plan itself is sound. The problem is what the gold weighs. Hubert Cornfield directs; seventy-two minutes. A noir made on a small budget, with little dialogue and almost no music. It is now regarded as one of the tightest films of its kind: what it is about is not the robbery but the impossibility of carrying what you stole.