'C'-Man

Here's one of those B-movie nuggets that makes sifting through the dregs worthwhile (quite appropriate for a tale of jewel smugglers). I'm sure it's exactly the kind of edgy, low-budget genre-piece that inspired Godard and Truffaut to create "Breathless" and "Shoot the Piano Player".

Like its near namesake "T-Men", the heroic semi-documentary frame limns a brutal, cynical noir with striking location shooting. The narrative keeps throwing us curveballs, and the tight, off-kilter framing, low-key lighting and nervy editing emphasize the randomness of the violence and the desperation of the denizens of this demimonde. Most arresting is the frantic free-jazz score, presaging Miles Davis's improvised work for "Lift to the Gallows".

The characters are idiosyncratic and played with verve. Like several other late noirs, there is an undercurrent of homosexuality among the henchmen, and John Carradine's quack doctor is addicted to Benedictine, of all things. A great, offbeat, late-night view.

I did not know this movie at all and I must admit that it is not bad at all but forgettable. Just as the other films directed by this Joseph Lerner, for instance GIRL ON THE RUN. But it is worth watching, after all John Carradine and Dean Jagger contribute a lot to the story, but they don't steal the show either. It is not a gritty.actionner, and anyway not an actionner at all. This is just an acceptable time waster, only destined to movie buffs in search of a rare item to watch. Even directed by a Joseph H Lewis or a Budd Boetticher, the result would have been the same - a bit better though - because there was nothing exceptional to take from such a story.

The first sentence uttered by our hero goes like "I am 35 years old" ! Dean Jagger was over 45 (46 actually) at the time .. and he looks it ! The fist fights were hilarious even when covered by sound effects. But the real star is the notorious Harry Landers (d. 2017), an old copy of Joe Pesci , but a bit taller !!

Dean Jagger who the following year would get the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Twelve O'Clock High was still sporting a toupee when he did this small independent noir film playing a US Customs Agent. Jagger is put on a case to find the killer of a fellow agent and friend. And as we know from The Maltese Falcon when a partner gets killed you're supposed to do something about it.

There's a gang that's smuggling expensive jewelry into the USA and using innocent women not in on the scam. In this case it's Lottie Elwen from the Netherlands. It's an interesting gimmick which I'll let you find out for yourself.

The film was shot entirely in New York on location and it has the same look and feel as The Naked City does. Harry Landers who later was on Ben Casey as a doctor is great as the gang's muscle. I wish we saw more of John Carradine as a disgraced doctor who is part of the smuggling scheme.

Best of all is Edith Atwater who later would play matronly and mother figures. Here she's one evil dame.

This one's a sleeper check it out.

When his best friend is murdered in pursuit of jewel smugglers, customs agent Dean Jagger finds himself assigned to track down the killers and close the case. He flies to Europe in order to catch a return flight on which a chief suspect (Réné Paul) will be traveling. Before boarding, Jagger makes the acquaintance of a war-bride (Lottie Elwen), journeying to America to join her fiancé.

During the night flight across the Atlantic, Elwen falls `ill;' (she's been drugged on board by soused-up sawbones John Carradine, working for the smuggling ring). From the airport, she's whisked away in a hijacked ambulance, wearing a priceless necklace. There's a traffic crash, and she escapes to flee (she thinks) to her waiting fiancé; alas, the groom-to-be has been murdered as well, by one of Paul‘s myrmidons, vicious hothead Harry Landers. Jagger meets her there, thinking she's an accomplice; when he comes to trust her, he goes undercover to penetrate the operation....

C-Man is a New York story told in the warts-and-all, in-your-face style of the following year's The Tattooed Stranger or Guilty Bystander (the latter also directed by Joseph Lerner) – a low-down, dirty town. The location shooting takes us to as many liquor stores as Ray Milland patronized in The Lost Weekend (Jagger is tracking down Carradine, who has a taste for pricey Benedictine), to jazz cellars and fleabag hotels (the one `penthouse' we visit is dowdily middle-class). Part of the grunge can be laid to a desperately low budget, but the filmmakers turn their liabilities into pungent atmosphere.

They also take some chances. One bludgeoning murder in this unusually brutal movie turns almost abstract, like an experimental film; the striking score by Gail Kubik (who by the way is male) evokes mid-century avant-garde classical music – of the `academic' school – or even third-stream jazz. The low-voltage Jagger, unfortunately, is a bit long in the tooth for the derring-do, and four-square for the lippy repartée, required of him. But beneath its tacky veneer, C-Man shows an unexpected grittiness and audacity.