Good concept, poorly executed.

The first must-see film of the year.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Chuck Connors steals the show in "Red Skies of Montana" director Joseph M. Newman's "Death in Small Doses" as a long-haul trucker addicted to illegal amphetamines in this criminal expose. The movie opens with a reckless trucker gobbling Benzedrine pills who has gone too long without sleep and then hallucinates that a car has swerved into his lane traffic. He tries to avoid smashing into the oncoming vehicle, plunges his rig down the side of hill and dies in the crash. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Washington, D.C., launches an investigation into this epidemic. They dispatch a clean-cut, square-jawed agent (Peter Graves of "Stalag 17") to infiltrate the trucking business and come up with a lead. Everybody that Tom Kaylor runs into while he masquerades as a student driver either is addicted to 'co-pilots' or dies from them. One guy dies from a heart attack that was connected to his amphetamine abuse while loading up Kaylor's truck. As Mink Reynolds, Connors lives at the same boarding house as Kaylor. Mink is strung out constantly and living perilously on the edge as if there is no tomorrow. The guy can get neither enough action nor enough amphetamines. He pushes them on Kaylor, but Kaylor doesn't buy. Eventually, even a workhorse like Mink succumbs to their dire effects, and reluctantly divulges to Kaylor the name of his source. Earlier, Tom had been training as a student driver with an older, more mature trucker, Wally Morse (Roy Engel of "The Naked Dawn") who knew how deleterious the drugs were. Morse stuck his neck out too far snooping around and got beaten to death at a truck stop while Kaylor was sleeping in the back of the cab. Now, with the tip that Mink gave him, Kaylor has a solid lead. Ironically, he discovers that the woman, Valerie 'Val' Owens (Mala Powers of "Rage at Dawn"), who runs the boarding house where he lives, is up to her ears in the amphetamine racket. Incidentally, she was married to the guy at the beginning of the movie who wrecked his rig and rolled it down a hillside. The criminals nab Kaylor and take him to remote spot where they intend to kill him when one of them changes his mind and helps Kaylor defeat them. The beauty of this concise, efficiently helmed, black & white, 79-minute film is that Newman doesn't waste a second. The dialogue is sharp, too.

Truckers depend on illegal amphetamines to stay awake over long distances, causing a number of road accidents. So the government assigns an undercover agent to expose the criminal connections.I expect this film amounts to an offspring of 1955's Man With a Golden Arm, the first post-war film to deal seriously with drug addiction. More directly is 1956's Bigger Than Life that dramatizes the maddening effects of a new prescription drug on an over-worked schoolteacher (James Mason). Up to 1955, drug addiction was pretty much taboo among non-exploitation filmmakers. So this minor oddity was dealing with an unusual topic not conventionally seen on the screen. (As a teen seeing the movie on initial release, I recall being puzzled by the topic).The movie itself is standard Hollywood expose—the clean-cut gov't agent (Graves), the nefarious criminal ring, a mysterious headman, plus a winsome romantic interest (Powers). Still, the director is Joe Newman who could occasionally rise above the potboiler as I think he does here with some effective touches. Note the well-played surprise twist, along with pill-popping Chuck Connors, a really long way from his sober-sided role in The Rifleman. In fact, I wouldn't have believed Connors' giddy performance if I hadn't seen it. Thanks to the several twists, unusual subject matter, and the manic Connors, the movie remains an oddly memorable potboiler, despite the lowly origins.

This movie is considered a "classic" in my family; my Dad was the agent (brilliantly acted by Peter Graves) on whom the title character was based. Hollywood added a romance but other than that they got the story (based on a series of articles about my Dad in the Saturday Evening Post) right. Some message boards about the movie criticize Chuck Connors for over-acting, but he didn't; that's how it was. This movie is a good reminder of what we owe to a lot of America's unsung heroes who have taken on messy tasks over the years to make America a safer place. Thanks to my Dad and other agents the movie now looks like a dated "period piece" portraying world with which we do not have to be familiar.

Note this commentary may contain a ***SPOILER**Another one of those "B" 1950's crime thrillers "...ripped from the pages of todays headlines." This film was inspired by a Saturday Evening Post expose about the use of amphetamines of long haul truck drivers. In this film, Peter Graves plays an FDA agent who goes undercover as a truck driver in order to get the goods on who is supplying the drivers with "bennies". Chuck Conners plays a hip talking truck driver hooked on the pills and freaks out and almost kills Peter. Mala Powers plays the widowed boarding house owner that caters to truck drivers whom Peter becomes romanticly involved. Too bad Peter never learned never to trust grieving widows who wear cocktail dresses. Robert Shayne has a small part as Peters boss. Graves gives his usual dependable performance as the determined agent. Its amazing how many of these forgotten low budget films Graves made in the 1950's. Chuck Conners however, goes way over the top as the hip talking, jazz loving amphetamine hooked truck driver. Mala Powers is attractive.