Whatever merits there might have been in John Steinbeck's novel "The Wayward Bus" they certainly aren't obvious in this film version directed by someone called Victor Vicas. The movie is just another soap-opera about a group of people who find themselves caught up together in an enclosed space, (an airplane, a boat, a stagecoach or, as here, a very rickety old bus), each acting out their own dramas while a potential disaster looms, in this case, a storm.
They include Jayne Mansfield, Dan Dailey, Dolores Michaels and driver Rick Jason, who is about as good-looking and about as wooden as a Regency Cabinet while back at base said driver's wife, Joan Collins, is busy hitting the bottle as well she might after finding herself in a crock like this. The acting is mostly miserable though Mansfield is surprisingly good as a stripper with a heart of gold and that fine character actor, Larry Keating is excellent as a slime-ball while Charles G. Clarke's black and white, Cinemascope photography adds the tiniest touch of class. It's also mercifully short at 87 minutes.
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