711 Ocean Drive

The address of Edmond O'Brien's posh Malibu digs -- 711 Ocean Drive -- lends the title to this semidocumentary noir about bookmaking. Unfortunately the movie is bookended by sermons instructing viewers on their civic responsibilities: the two bucks you put on a horse go straight to graft and murder! In between, it's not bad. O'Brien, always better supporting than, as here, in the lead, is a money-grubbing telephone technician who brings his electronic expertise to the illegal-betting circuit. The profits his innovations generate oil his swift climb up the syndicate ladder; his ruthlessness greases his slide down. Along the way, the movie casually includes what may be the first Hollywood episode of severe wife-battering, perpetrated on Joanne Dru. At the end, O'Brien's grasping ambitions are dwarfed by the enormity of Boulder Dam, and viewers are left with a sense of his brief notoriety being but a single cog in a vast, unstoppable crime machine. It's a dated message in a time when, increasingly, gambling with the government's blessing has become the new civic responsibility.