Alicia I love this movie so much

Linbeymusol Wonderful character development!

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Kien Navarro Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

blanche-2 Robert Taylor had been a familiar face in films for nearly 25 years when he made "Tip on a Dead Jockey" in 1957. Here, he plays Lloyd Tredman, a Korean war pilot who now lives in Madrid doing...well, not much. He is divorced (so he thinks) from his wife Phyllis (Dorothy Malone). However, she never signed the papers and travels to Madrid to find out what happened to their marriage and if there is any way to salvage it.Lloyd admits that he is no longer able to pilot a plane. He is haunted by what he saw in Korea and is now too scared and nervous to fly again. He is the part-owner of a race horse, and is looking forward to winning a lot of money as a result of the race.Before that happens, he is approached by a man who offers him $25,000 to smuggle money out of the country. Lloyd doesn't like it, but he says it all depends on what happens in the race. When the race doesn't turn out as planned, Lloyd is sure that the smuggler had something to do with it. Angry, he refuses to accept the job. Instead, it goes to his close friend Jimmy (Jack Lord). When Jimmy is delayed, his wife (Gia Scala) becomes hysterical, and becomes worse when Jimmy announces he's doing it again! At that point, Lloyd takes over. It's not a smooth trip, with Lloyd almost not able to take off due to being paralyzed from nerves. He finally does, and if anything could happen, it does.This isn't a great movie. It moves slowly and there isn't a lot of action. It's interesting to see Jack Lord pre-Hawaii Five-O, young and with a slightly higher speaking voice and wearing less makeup than he did on his TV show. Dorothy Malone was attractive and good, but the plot is obvious.Taylor, always solid and likable, did six films with director Richard Thorpe. I am a fan of classic films, so I watch him because he is from the golden age, but also because he was my late mother's absolute favorite. He does a good job here.A few words about my mom's favorite guy, after my father, of course. The kid from Nebraska, with his resonant speaking voice and perfect face went on from this film to a successful TV series, "The Detectives," and continued in films until his death from lung cancer at the age of 57, in 1969. Yeah, the cigarettes got most of them.He is somewhat out of favor for testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a friendly witness. However, a new book, Robert Taylor: Reluctant Witness, disputes this. In truth, I don't think he was the sharpest knife in the drawer and probably didn't understand the impact of the committee -- and, like many, he saw Communism as a threat. He claimed to have used bad judgment in accepting the film "Song of Russia." The truth? He did whatever Louis B. Mayer told him to do and wasn't aware that it was making a political statement until someone told him it was pro-Communist. He lived under the umbrella of MGM nearly his entire career and just did what he was assigned.It's not an excuse, and I'm the last one to applaud blacklisting or witch hunts. But everyone who testified had an agenda. Except probably Robert Taylor, who, when he left MGM, didn't know how to make a dinner reservation.

Robert J. Maxwell Robert Taylor is an irresponsible ex-pilot surviving in Madrid on is winnings at roulette and he's visited by his wife, Dorothy Malone, on whom he ran out. What's his problem? Well, he's been a pilot in two wars and it's eroded his confidence. (Kids: Those two wars are World War II and Korea. PS: We won the first and drew a stalemate on the second. PPS: Madrid is in Spain.) He even had to quit his job flying for a commercial airline.Other characters include his egregiously unfunny comic sidekick, Marcel Dalio, his flying buddy Jack Lord, and Lord's wife Gia Scala. Taylor is cutely, kiddingly, flirtatious with Lord's wife, wisecracking that it's the job of a man's best friend, to be in love with the best friend's wife.Enter the unctuous Martin Gabel, short and bald, who offers Taylor an amazing sum to simply fly some money from Egypt to Sicily for an Egyptian millionaire. Gabel engineers an accident in a horse race that kills the jockey and leaves Taylor broke. But Taylor still doesn't accept, and not just on moral grounds but because he's terrified of flying an airplane. No single traumatic episode lies behind the phobia. It's simply that there has been an accretion of guilt over the responsibilities he's had that have led to the death of so many of his friends. If that sounds like a loose end, a weakness in the plot, it's not. It would have been far easier to pin the blame on an accident while Taylor was at the controls, the kind of hoary cliché parodied in "Airplane." Taylor's demons are more diffuse, more challenging.At any rate, if Taylor himself is uninterested in undertaking this illegal but "perfectly safe" smuggling deal, his best friend Jack Lord is not. Lord accepts the job and returns three days later, revealing that it turned out to be more dangerous than described but only a dry run.Lord is anxious to get going again but he's not the flier that Taylor is, so Taylor cold cocks him and takes off with Dalio seated beside him. It develops that there is more to the job than simply smuggling some harmless cash from Egypt into Italy. Gabel is a treacherous murderer.The title is keen, isn't it? "Tip On A Dead Jockey"? And the death of the jockey is integral to the plot. Further, the story itself is full of potential. International smuggling, with a sweating Robert Taylor jockeying the endangered airplane through the sky, pursued by pursuit planes, and Dalio making wisecracks and swilling booze out of the bottle? And, in fact, the script isn't unintelligently written. There is a scene, for instance, in which Dorothy Malone has an shouting argument with Taylor and pins down his psychodynamics in a most convincing manner, that explains such otherwise obscure plot elements as Taylor's flirting with Lord's wife -- not that it's been in any way bothersome to anyone.But it doesn't rise above the mediocre. I was trying to figure out why it didn't. I think the problem lies with the uninspired direction by Richard Thorpe and the stiff, routinized acting of some of the principals. Marcel Dalio, in a familiar role, doesn't go wrong, but Jack Lord sounds like the TV personality he was to become, Taylor's range is limited to grim sincerity, and the lovely Dorothy Malone can't act at all. Gia Scala is animated enough and queerly attractive.But the direction is approached as if it were some humdrum job, fixing a flat tire or something. It's Spain but without color. There is no poetry in it. I'll give one example of what I mean. At a party, Taylor is playing up to Gia Scala, showing a little more than the amount of affection called for, and Taylor's wife, Malone, is watching with interest. There are several reaction shots of her. And that's all she does. She watches. She stares at the semi-seductive exchange between her husband and another man's wife without the slightest hint of embarrassment, jealousy, irritation, anxiety, or any of the other emotions a normally loving and possessive spouse would display. Thorpe never asked her to lower her gaze or turn away or change her expression. It's as if the director's thoughts went no farther than, "Let's see -- the flirting calls for the three of them to be in the shot so I'll put the camera here. Then, for a close up, I'll put the camera over here. There, that's it!"I'll let it go at that. It's a great title. The movie isn't dislikable. It's just that it would have been even easier to smuggle in the drama than it was to smuggle in the illegal cash. The failure is due to pilot error.

bkoganbing Tip On A Dead Jockey is an average action/adventure film that finds Robert Taylor as an Air Force veteran settled in Spain after he thinks he's gotten a divorce from Dorothy Malone. He's a Korean War pilot group commander who ordered too many men to their deaths and is now just sick of flying. He's living in Madrid with house guest Marcel Dalio and his best friends are fellow Korean war pilot Jack Lord and his wife Gia Scala.It turns out his divorce never went through with Malone so she follows him to Europe to see if she can get her man back. At the same time a rather oily Martin Gabel comes along with a proposition if he'll take a certain package from Cairo to Spain he can receive a handsome amount of cash, enough to clear up his mounting debts.Taylor might need that money as a steeplechase race he had some heavy bets on was lost due to a spill that cost the jockey his life. It's only when Scala puts her foot down on Jack Lord making the run that Taylor does with Dalio along for company.Tip On A Dead Jockey is a strangely introspective action film with Taylor just wanting to retire from life and wanting to leave Malone because he feels she's entitled to the man she married, not who he is now. Dorothy Malone was fresh off an Oscar for Written on the Wind and she was at the height of her career. She's miles from the amoral nymphomaniac she got the Oscar for. But she's also far away from the good girl leading ladies she had played for a decade in any number of B films. Malone gives a good account of herself the woman not taking divorce for an answer. Martin Gabel played mostly oily characters in his film career, so just his first appearance on the screen tells you he's up to no good. Hence there's no real suspense in Tip On A Dead Jockey.Though he gets out of the bind Gabel puts him in, it's a strangely action-less conclusion to the film. Probably it's closer than to what most of us would do in the situation.Tip On A Dead Jockey features some earnest performances by the cast, but the film is not on the best 10 list for any involved.And we never do find out what happened to that jockey.

art_27 A wooden treatment of a shell shocked Korean war vet expatting it in Madrid. Malone barely registers ennui, disillusionment, or any other weight of the world characteristics; he acts more like the suburban dad opting not to shave all weekend. Dalio, the Casablanca croupier, is reduced to playing Malone's colorful sidekick, but a little goes a long way. Jack Lord and his Kennedyesque hairdo go through the motions. Bits of the script, co-written by Shaw, stand out, especially Malone comparing his domestic situation to a Balzac story, "too many people." The title drew me in, and I got a pig in a poke.