Just watched the 1961 film Ring of Fire. It feels like a morning fever dream: two deputies encounter three delinquents delinquenting. But on the way into town, the girl delinquent (Bobbie) pulls a gun and they hold the deputies hostage. The first half of the film seems to be about this hostage situation, as the group hides in the woods and search party closes in. Then the second half turns into a disaster film about a fire. The final scene of the film shifts all of this into an inadvertent romance. I think the film is somewhat confused about what it wants to be.
So the first 50 or so minutes focuses on walking through the woods and building out the search party. Not much to say here, except that, over the course of these events, Bobbie tries to seduce the lead character deputy, Steve. In the movie logic of the 1960s, he is tempted but ultimately resists. This becomes relevant later.
Steve eventually gets the gun and the other deputy gets away, but the two dudes (Roy and Frank) are scheming, and they hatch a plan while climbing a steep hill: they’ll push Bobbie down so Steve is distracted saving her; meanwhile, they’ll snatch the gun. The plan goes off in what I can only describe as realistically awkward blocking: Roy pushes Bobbie, then runs alongside her. The deputy only seems to see Bobbie; Roy runs behind the deputy, grabs the gun, and runs back in the time that the deputy is struggling to put Bobbie’s legs on the hill. Then they try to make the deputy’s death look like an accident, but Roy has an accident instead, falling to his presumable death.
At this point, the film is over half over and there is no fire. Well, Smokey weeps: Frank, now with the gun, insists on smoking his cigarette, and he drops it in the woods. The camera closes in and we see the smoke grow from where it fell through the underbrush. The ring of fire has begun, and the entertaining kidnapping story begins to turn into a disaster film.
Eventually Bobbie, Frank, and Steve are ambushed by a large group of deputies and loggers. In a twist, Frank accuses Steve of statutory rape, a charge that Bobbie goes along with and the others take seriously. Then the group catches sight of the fire and head back into town to evacuate. In one of the stranger scenes, the sheriff, Steve, and another deputy then take Bobbie alone to a cabin to interrogate Bobbie about whether the statutory rape really happened. Bobbie suggesting that Steve “succumbed” to her “advances” infuriates the other deputy, who seeks to hit Bobbie until restrained by Steve and the sheriff. This, in 1960s movie logic, shows Steve to be a good guy caught in a bad place.
By the time they get back to town, the evacuation is well underway, the north road out of town is closed, and soon the south wall is closed too. They are in a ring of fire. Steve, with Bobbie, commandeers an old train engine with a couple of passenger compartments, and they run it slowly through the center of town to pick up survivors. Maybe the strongest cinematography of the film is here, where real pictures of forest fire are put alongside apocalyptic cuts of people running across a burning town to get to the train. It reminds me of what Birds (1963) would do two years later, except this one is with fire, not birds. People load up and the train rides through the ring of fire.
Finally they get to a bridge, already on fire. They try to cross but the train is jammed. So they have to get off on foot and cross. Tension builds as Frank climbs down the bridge (to evade the deputies?) and Steve and Bobbie cross the train to the popping noises of trusses breaking. The main engine and the two passenger compartments successively fall into the river below. The practical effects are amazing - they actually did wreck a train for the shots. Frank probably dies in the collapse; Steve and Bobbie make it across with the townsfolk.
If the film had ended here, I would have been entertained. No, instead we have one more scene between Steve and Bobbie, where Bobbie cries about being all mixed up and Steve calls her special and promises that, like all the people whose town has just burned up, they too can start over. Then they kiss. Then the movie ends. Wait, what? The implication based on some sheriff dialogue earlier is that, with Frank dead, the statutory rape charge against Steve won’t stand. Yet people would still have memories, right? Isn’t him kissing her the start of the same thing? Was a meet-cute during a kidnapping with some weird underage stuff the point all along? Was she underage, or was that part of the lie too? It’s all mixed up.
Going back to some of the promo materials of the film, I can see how all that is being mixed together. How’s this for a tagline? “Caught … between a wall of leaping flame and a killer’s loaded gun … and his fate in the hands of the girl on his arms who could send him to prison for life!”
Extra: MGM Pressbook (Internet Archive)
