This film is from the tiny production company Pine-Thomas. Considering their tiny budgets and quick turnover, you certainly WON'T mix this up with a decent film from one of the bigger studios! To but it bluntly, it's a third-rate film. "High Powered" is a very familiar sort of film. The big studios made decent films such as "Slim" and "Manpower" with very, very similar themes....and in this case Pine-Thomas manages to copy them but do worse in every possible way!.
The story begins with a kooky scene where two annoying women pick up a hitchhiker. The ladies are on their way with their lunch wagon to work at a construction site...and the guy is intend on getting a job as a fruit picker. However, after the super-annoying kooky scene ends, the boss of the construction job, Rod (Roger Pryor) comes to make everything right--and he discovers the hitchhiker is none other than Tim Scott (Robert Lowery). Tim is an expert who could really help Rod on his job site--but would rather pick fruit which would earn him far less. Why? Well, it turns out that Tim had a bad accident while working way, way up high and he's afraid to return to that sort of work...and Rod is intent on helping his old friend get over his fears. But, when a girl comes between them, Tim has had enough and is ready to walk off the job when something happens...something EVERYONE in the audience knew was coming and expected it only 10 minutes into the film!
So why did I hate this film so much? Well, it didn't help that the two male leads were dull and uninteresting....but the big problem were the supporting characters. Joe Sawyer and Mary Treen were included as comic relief and EVERYTHING the pair said and did was annoying and you just wanted them to go away forever! It also didn't help that the female love interest had about as much charisma as a rotting banana. I cannot blame this all on the actors....Sawyer, for example, was a decent character actor and showed this in many other films. Here, however, the dialog sounds as if the script was written in an afternoon...something that IS possible since this is such a low-budget B-movie! The director, also, shares much of the blame and the sum total is a very predictable, clichéd and often stupid film.
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