The title - and the first few minutes - of When Gangland Strikes promise a rough slice of urban criminality. It's a promise that goes largely unredeemed, because the movie mellows down and sweetens up into a homespun, small-town story that might almost have been made in the 1930s as a vehicle for Lewis Milestone's Judge Hardy.
Raymond Greenleaf, who played many a judge himself in small, post-war movies, is the prosecuting attorney in the idyllic hamlet of Rosedale, and known for his leniency toward petty lawbreakers. But a smartly engineered change of venue brings mobster Anthony Caruso into town to stand trial for murder; in his possession is a letter proving that Greenleaf's daughter (Marjie Millar) is in fact the child of a woman serving a life sentence who recently died. Family values win out, and Greenleaf deliberately bungles the prosecution, leading to a petition for his recall.
His successor and future son-in-law (John Hudson) decides to reopen the case and, in consequence, a jumbo can of worms involving both his bride-to-be and Greenleaf's complicity in throwing the trial. It also brings Caruso back into the picture, this time with fatal results....
Viewers will recognize a cast of familiar faces with unfamiliar names from bit-parts on both big and little screens (Richard Deacon and Slim Pickens among them). It betrays the influence television was having on movies in the climactic courtroom confrontation, which would become a staple of the Perry Mason series to debut the following year. When Gangland Strikes, with its cluster of generic supporting characters and its morally reassuring world, could almost have been the pilot for a TV series that never got off the ground. Who knows? Maybe it was.
