Alicia I love this movie so much

Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Solemplex To me, this movie is perfection.

Fleur Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

bob.decker Bourgeois snobs who can't just enjoy a movie without trying to categorize it might have a hard time watching this picture without feeling guilty, but this low-budget effort has become a cult classic for delivering 80 minutes of fast-moving entertainment, and whether any of it makes any more sense in terms of a believable story is rather beside the point. What you get is a pretty smart script, a young Lee Marvin showing a comedic side for which his later work provided only occasional outlets, and future industry veterans doing the kind of great character work that results in long Hollywood careers. To pull this off on an Allied Artists budget and have people talking about it 55 years later is no small accomplishment. One is even led to assume that the very experienced Edward Dein and the others involved in putting this together knew exactly what they were doing.

Jem Odewahn What a crazy and terrible film this is! It's watchable because it's so random. When Lee Marvin's character's name is Slob, you know a film is worth watching. And when Slob just happens to be the biggest scientific threat to America EVER (this is one of the Cold-War fright films) masquerading as a greasy spoon cafe cook, you just can't stop watching the film! Best line-- "Go and clean that greasy griddle, Slob", said to Marvin, who looks like he's about to pour piping hot coffee on anyone's face in every scene. The film is impossible to follow, with customers at the grimy 101 shack striking up random conversations with each other about nothing in particular. Terry Moore is the waitress who every man in the film wants to jump. The film has an AWESOME opening scene with a scantily clad Moore lying on the beach, and Marvin in the background with his ear to a shell. And he tries to jump her there and then!! There's also some inane stuff about weight-lifting and trying on flippers next to the counter. Hard not to recommend, even if it is awful.

sol The movie starts out with a real cool jazzy score like something you would expect from a movie like "The Gene Krupa Story. The opening scene has Kotty, Terry Moore, lying on the beach getting sun and surf until Slob, Lee Marvin, who notices her from a distance starts getting fresh with her and ends up getting a couple of seashells thrown at him. You don't really know what the movie is about until the professor, Frank Lovejoy,comes on the scene and from him talking to Knotty you realize that he's working at a top secret government facility just up the road from the diner where Knotty and Slob work.The movie goes along it's somewhat comical pace with Slob acting like Ed Norton in "the Honeymooners" messing up everything that he does as a cook at the diner until we see the person delivering fish and Slob start whispering with him out of earshot of the diners owner George, Keenan Wynn, and then the fisherman slips Slob something . Later Slob all by himself in his room begins to take on a new look, not kooky and funny but dead serious, as we see him take what the fisherman gave him and put it into a viewfinder. Slob sees some kind of mathematical formula and it's then when you realize that this is a story about espionage.Not really as corny and obnoxious as most movies about the Communist threat against America was back then in the 1950's with Lee Marvin stealing every scene that he's in as the greasy cook turned top Soviet spy and being very convincing at it. Frank Lovejoy in a role very similar to his previous Communist fighting movie "I was a Communist for the FBI" is also very convincing as a man torn between the truth and a lie by trying to infiltrate the Communist spy ring led by Slob. Where at the same time not being able to tell his girlfriend, Knotty, who thinks that he's a spy for the Soviets, without blowing his cover. Terry Moore was very good as a naive girl who learned a lot during the movie about who to trust and who not to. Like in the espionage business all that you see is not what you think. All and all a much better movie about espionage during the cold war then most movies about the subject were back them with a great performance by Lee Marvin, one of his best. "Shack out at 101" sadly showed that in those troubled times the paranoia that griped the USA was so extreme that you couldn't trust anyone when it came to being a Communist spy. Even the cook serving you coffee and apple pie at your neighborhood diner.

bmacv The shack out on Highway 101 just north of San Diego is an oceanside greasy-spoon hung with nautical bric-a-brac like a Red Lobster franchise. It's also the regional headquarters for an subversive spy ring and the claustrophobic setting for one of the oddest fish spawned during the Red Scare paranoia of the post-war years. Keenan Wynn owns the joint, with short-order cook Lee Marvin and waitress Terry Moore as his live-in help, an arrangement as uncomfortable for Moore as it is convenient for Marvin, who can't keep his hands or lips off her. Regulars include Frank Lovejoy (as an unspecified 'professor' romancing Moore), salesman Whit Bissell, an old fisherman making 'deliveries' right off the boat, and a couple of drivers for theAcme Poultry Company who come in for coffee and cherry pie. In this entrepôt big wads of cash get traded for tiny slivers of microfilm. And operatives losing their nerve or asking too many questions get dead.Few of those movies which the studios felt constrained to issue in testimony to their rock-solid Americanism were much good (and audiences shunned them like week-old mackerel). But they shared an utter lack of humor and a suffocating tone of moral urgency. This one is more perplexing. The prevailing tone remains light, at times veering toward farce, to an extent that the very real possibility presents itself that the whole thing is a very sly put-on. One morning when Wynn and Marvin, stripped to their waists, engage in some weight-lifting, Wynn insists that his chest muscles be referred to as 'pecs.' Marvin retorts 'I'm very happy with my pecs,' whereupon they call in Moore to judge which of them has the better legs. In another scene, Moore, lighted through the holes of a hanging colander, looks like she contracted some exotic contagion. But then the movie shifts abruptly into cloak-and-dagger episodes right out of B-movies of the international intrigue genre. Towards the end, the heart sinks as it becomes clear that the movie means us to take it seriously. But serious about what? Never is the word 'Communist' uttered.