The Undercover Man (1949)

The Undercover Man is a 1949 Columbia crime thriller directed by Joseph H. Lewis.

It is obviously inspired by the Al Capone case. It had become clear that there was no way of convicting Capone for racketeering. Then the Federal Government figured out that they didn’t need to. They could get him for tax fraud instead. They didn’t care what they put him in prison for as long as they put him in prison.

The Undercover Man deals with a similar case set in an unnamed city involving an unnamed big-time gangster (referred to simply as the Big Fellow). This is essentially a police procedural. For Treasury Special Agent Frank Warren (Glenn Ford) and his colleagues it’s a lengthy painstaking investigation. They have to go through thousands of accounts, looking for some small slip-up made by the mobsters. This might sound like a boring setup for a movie but in fact it’s gripping and fascinating.

They cannot find a slip-up but they can find a stool pigeon. This seems likely to solve their problems but it doesn’t and it’s back to the grind. But there is always the possibility of another stool pigeon. No matter how terrified the Big Fellow’s underlings might be there will always be someone crazy enough or desperate enough or greedy enough to sell out even the scariest mob boss. T-Men like Frank Warren know this. It’s just a matter of handling stool pigeons the right way, and making sure they don’t become dead stool pigeons.

The focus is on methodical law enforcement work but also on the effect that lengthy tough dangerous cases have on the investigating officers. The dangers are real and the stress is extreme, and the endless frustrations can wear a man down.

Glenn Ford was perfect casting for a role like this. He was a low-key actor and he plays Frank Warren as a man who has mastered the art of keeping his emotions under control. To be a good T-Man you have to be able to function like a machine, but Ford has no problem showing us that Frank really is a man and not a machine. He can switch off his emotions to get the job done but he has a wife and if forced to choose between the job and his wife he would choose his wife. It’s that stubborn underlying decency and humanity that makes him a formidable enemy to monsters. There were few actors as subtle as Glenn Ford.

There’s a very competent supporting cast with Barry Kelley as the very crooked but very clever Mob lawyer O’Rourke being the standout.

Nina Foch as Frank’s wife gets almost nothing to do. That is perhaps deliberate. The focus is on Frank Warren. His love for his wife is a central motivation for him but there’s no need for the movie to get bogged down in the details of his domestic life. Frank Warren and O’Rourke and the battle of wits between them provide the core of the movie.

This is not film noir. It has none of the key ingredients of film noir. It does however have some of the tone and feel of the movies that would later be labelled as film noir. You could say it’s noir-tinged. Mostly it’s a very tough very gritty hardboiled crime thriller/police procedural.

It has a touch of that semi-documentary (or pseudo-documentary) approach that was becoming fashionable in movies like The Naked City. Burnett Guffey’s cinematography helps.

Incidentally there are no undercover men at all in this movie!

Joseph H. Lewis is best-known for Gun Crazy and The Big Combo but some of his more obscure movies such as A Lady Without Passport and Cry of the Hunted are worth tracking down. Maybe The Undercover Man is not quite top-tier Lewis but it’s tense and gripping and it has an authentic feel and it’s highly recommended.

The Powerhouse Indicator Blu-Ray provides a very nice transfer. The extras include an audio commentary.

The Big Combo (1955)

The Big Combo is a 1955 film noir released by Allied Artists. Allied Artists was the successor company to Monogram and they specialised in B+ pictures - movies budgeted midway between B-pictures and A-pictures, with better production values than the typical B-movie.

The Big Combo is certainly a lot more visually impressive than most B-features. That’s party due to having an imaginative director in the person of Joseph H. Lewis (who had made one of the greatest B-movies of all time, Gun Crazy, a few years earlier). But mostly it’s due to the work of genius cinematographer John Alton. Alton took the noir visual style and took it to a whole different level. No-one has ever understood light the way Alton understood it. The Big Combo’s claims to being a major entry in the noir canon rest as much on Alton’s contribution as on Lewis’s.

This is an obsessive cop story. The obsessive cop in this case is Lieutenant Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde). He is consumed by his desire to nail big-time gangster Mr Brown (Richard Conte). His obsession has already landed him in trouble with the Police Department but he won’t let up.

What makes things more interesting (and more noirish) is that Diamond isn’t just a dedicated cop. He has a personal grudge against Mr Brown. That grudge is connected with Brown’s girlfriend Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace). Diamond is in love with Susan.

Susan takes too many pills one night and ends up in hospital. She is heard muttering the word Alicia. Diamond is convinced that that word is the key to breaking Brown. Diamond has no idea what the word’s significance might be, but his gut instincts tell him that it means more to Brown than it does to Susan, and that it represents something he has never been able to find - a weakness in Brown’s armour.

Finding out what the name signifies will be a formidable task. Diamond has nothing to go on. But he is a man obsessed and eventually he discovers something. Maybe it’s that key he’s been looking for.

Brown of course is taking action to cover his tracks, and the body count slowly rises.

There’s plenty of conflict between loyalty and betrayal in this movie. Diamond is going to have to find someone willing to betray Mr Brown. And Mr Brown has to be sure that he has taken watertight precautions to avoid betrayal in his own ranks, betrayal being an occupational hazard to gangsters. Brown knows all about betrayal - about being betrayed and betraying others.

Philip Yordan’s screenplay provides a very solid mystery plot.

This is however a movie that is impressive for its style rather than its substance. And it has a great deal of style. It has plenty of noir atmosphere as well.

It lacks some of the film noir trademarks. There’s no voiceover narration, there are no flashbacks, there is no femme fatale. Susan does not qualify as a true femme fatale. Her actions are not always wholly admirable but she’s in a tight spot and she’s just doing what she needs to do to survive. She has no interest in trying to corrupt or manipulate the hero. She never wanted him to fall for her and she never uses his feelings for her against him. She’s not a straightforward bad girl either. The worst thing she can be accused of is having made a mistake when she fell in love with Mr Brown. One thing that is interesting is the suggestion that her attraction to Brown is mostly sexual, and the very faint suggestion that she gets off on playing the submissive role. The erotic heat between Brown and Susan was rather daring for 1955.

Rita, a burlesque dancer with whom Diamond has had some kind of romantic entanglement, is no femme fatale either.

I’m not quite sure that Diamond is a classic noir protagonist either. His obsessiveness is taken to extremes and he is to some extent twisted up as a result. Perhaps Cornel Wilde just didn’t have the acting chops to show us the extent to which Diamond is in danger of running right off the rails.

Mr Brown is your basic gangster bad guy. He’s bad at the beginning of the story and he stays bad.

This is a movie that looks and feels like full-blooded film noir, in fact there are very few movies that look more noirish than this one, but thematically it’s a straightforward crime thriller albeit a fairly hard-edged one.

Cornel Wilde’s performance is very competent but not very inspired. Richard Conte is in wonderfully chilling form. Brian Donlevy is superb as Brown’s chief lieutenant, Joe McClure, a man who is both weak and ambitious. Lee Van Cleef and Earl Holliman are terrific as Brown’s two chief enforcers. They’re not very bright but they’re dangerous enough.

This is a really fine movie that edges its way into greatness by virtue of John Alton’s stunning cinematography and Lewis’s ability to create memorable visual set-pieces. The Big Combo is highly recommended.

The Falcon in San Francisco (1945)

The Falcon in San Francisco was the eleventh of RKO’s very successful Falcon B-movies and the eighth to star Tom Conway as The Falcon. It was released in 1945.

Tom Lawrence (AKA The Falcon) and his sidekick ‘Goldie’ Locke are heading for San Francisco for a well-earned vacation, but of course when detectives go on vacation you can be sure that murder will follow them. On the train they meet a cute little girl named Annie Marshall, along with her cute little dog named Diogenes. Annie solemnly informs them that he is being kept a prisoner in her own house. Of course it’s the sort of crazy thing that eight-year-olds do say so they don’t take much notice.

And then Annie’s nurse turns up dead. Tom Lawrence has a suspicion that it might be murder. So now he’s definitely interested.

On arrival in San Francisco Tom volunteers to take Annie to her home, and is promptly arrested for kidnapping. He is bailed out by the mysterious Doreen Temple and he is then beaten up. Now Tom is very interested indeed.

He does have one promising clue to what is starting to look like an intriguing mystery. The nurse’s name was Carla Keyes and Tom finds a photo of an Abel Keyes, first mate on the S.S. Citadel, a ship with a colourful past. And there’s a connection between Annie Marshall’s sister Joan and a shipping line, Star Costal Lines, the one for which Abel Keyes works.

It’s obvious that Doreen Temple is telling lies, but then Joan Marshall isn’t telling the truth either, and neither is the shipping line’s manager, De Forrest Marshall. There’s at least one conspiracy, undoubtedly criminal, at work but there may in fact be more than one. Rather than just blundering about The Falcon sets to work to follow up all the leads. There are double-crosses and the people doing the double-crossing are also being double-crossed. It’s a pretty neat little mystery plot for a B-feature.

Surprisingly for a B-picture there’s some actual location shooting. Joseph H. Lewis, who went on to become a film noir legend as director of Gun Crazy and The Big Combo, was still learning the ropes at this stage but he’s already more than competent and there are a few typical Lewis touches.

 Perhaps not surprisingly for a Joseph H. Lewis movie there’s some effective atmosphere and even a hint of film noir in both the visuals and the tone. This is a well-crafted little film.

Tom Conway breezes through his part with his usual easy-going charm. Edward Brophy as the likeable rough among Goldie provides low-key but non-irritating comic relief. Fay Helm is a serviceable femme fatale. Sharyn Moffett as Annie is cute without being annoying. Rita Corday is fine as Annie’s sister Joan. Carl Kent is excellent as the smooth but sinister gunman Rickey. Overall the acting is very solid indeed.

All the Falcon movies are available in two made-on-demand DVD sets from the Warner Archive series. The Falcon in San Francisco is included in the second set. I saw this movie on cable TV so I cannot comment on the quality of the DVD sets although the Warner Archive releases are usually pretty good.

This is an above-average entry in the Falcon cycle (and all the Falcon films are at the very least reasonably entertaining) and it’s an above-average B-movie. It’s well-acted, well-plotted and well-made. The Falcon in San Francisco is highly recommended.