Chandler’s Trailers: “Breakheart Pass” (1975)

    This aberration in the Alistair MacLean canon moves the author’s signatory plot twists, secret identities and hidden motives to the Old West in “Breakheart Pass”, a film plagued with the very fact that it does feature what is, by this time, a very discernible and overly familiar formula whose narrative “surprises” are more easily calculable to anyone who has seen more than a few of his previous books find screen life. When a train traveling to remote Fort Humboldt, armed with medicine to combat an outbreak of diphtheria, encounters a series of unexplained killings-  including the mass death of two carloads full of soldiers  -it is left to the mental acumen of captured arsonist and murderer John Deakin (Charles Bronson) to unravel just what is transpiring; all the while accompanied by less concerned fellow travelers including the Governor (Richard Crenna), an Army major (Ed Lauter) and a sheriff (Ben Johnson)! Per usual in a film version of a MacLean novel, the good guys are easily identifiable (no matter how decorous the masquerade) by the prominence of billing, thus Deakin will be assured a placement on the side of the angels as his name rises above the title. 

To read the complete review, click the following link to: https://chandlerswainreviews.wordpress.com/chandlers-trailers-short-bits-for-emerging-cinephiles-and-a-better-america/