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The House on 92nd Street, 1945. Directed by Henry Hathaway. William Eythe, Lloyd Nolan, Signe Hasso, Gene Lockhart, Leo G. Carroll, William Post, Lydia St. Clair.

Synopsis: Newly graduated diesel engineer William Dietrich is approached by German agents in the hope of recruiting him as a fifth columnist in the coming war. Dietrich, a loyal American in spite of his German heritage, goes to the FBI with the offer and the FBI set him up as a double agent. He goes to the German spy training facility in Hamburg and is inserted into his new role just prior to the outbreak of war. The FBI rounds up known German agents when war is declared, but leaves the cell with which Dietrich is working intact, in the hopes of nabbing the elusive "Mr. Christopher," and agent who has penetrated the mysterious "Process 97," one of America's atomic secrets. The spy ring doesn't entirely trust Dietrich, whose credentials seem fishy to them, and it's a race to find Mr. Christopher before Dietrich's cover is blown...

The Street With No Name, 1948. Directed by William Keighley. Mark Stevens, Richard Widmark, Lloyd Nolan, Barbara Lawrence, John McIntyre, Ed Begley.

Synopsis: A woman is shot at a night club. A bank guard is shot during a robbery. Both victims are shot with the same gun. The bank robbery is a federal crime, which lands the case in the lap of FBI Special Agent Briggs. In the first round-up, Briggs nets a small-timer named Danka, who claims to have been in Chicago at the time of the initial crime. It turns out that he actually WAS in Chicago, but when he makes bond before Briggs heads down to release him, Danka winds up in the sights of the real perpetrators. He then winds up dead. Other means are required. Briggs recruits Agent Cordell, the top of his class at the academy, to send him undercover into underworld of organized crime. At a boxing match, Cordell makes contact with an up-and-coming crime boss Stiles, who takes him under his wing. It's a race to get the goods on Stiles before Cordell's luck runs out.

Call Northside 777, 1948. Directed by Henry Hathaway. James Stewart, Richard Conte, Lee J. Cobb, Helen Walker.

Synopsis: 1932. The tail end of prohibition. Chicago. Frank Wiecek is in the wrong place at the wrong time and is fingered for the murder of a cop. In spite of the circumstantial evidence against him, Wiecek is placed at the scene of the crime by an eye-witness with her own agenda. Wiecek is convicted and sentenced to 99 years in prison. Eleven years pass. An ad runs in the Chicago Times offering a reward of $5000 for information that will exonerate Wiecek. Reporter J. P. McNeal is assigned to investigate the ad and discovers that it was placed by Wiecek's mother, who has scrubbed floors for eleven years in order to amass the reward money. McNeal writes a story about her, then decides to interview her son. McNeal is convinced of his guilt, at first. His conviction, after all, was upheld on appeal. But as he delves deeper into the case, he discovers that things are not necessarily so cut and dry. His skepticism begins to crumble even as a deadline to prove Wiecek's innocence presents itself in the form of a pardon board. McNeal lacks one crucial bit of evidence, and must refute the testimony of the eyewitness who identified Wiecek in the first place. But first, he has to find her...

Definitions swirl around film noir, though none are conclusive. Film noir is an idiom--not a genre, mind you--which is defined by its "feel" more than anything else, which means that statements like "film noir is always black and white" is belied by color films like Leave Her To Heaven or Slightly Scarlet that "feel" like noir. You can make a laundry list of the elements of film noir, and yet you can find films that contain none of those elements in the noir canon. It's a slippery kind of idiom.

The three films I'm concerned with here belong to the noir canon--mainly on the basis of their look--but if they are film noir, they belong to a subgenre of film noir that is less expressionistic than what is normally called film noir. All of these films are semi-documentary procedural films. If these were couched in literary terms, they would be more Ed McBain than James M. Cain. They are no-nonsense reportage occasionally couched in the visual language of film noir. Other films in this particular sector of cinema include The Naked City, He Walked by Night, and The Asphalt Jungle. This branch of crime film was most prevalent at 20th Century Fox, it seems. Daryl Zanuck got the idea into his head that the audience of returning service men--having traveled the world during the war--would recognize fakery in studio shooting and sent his directors out to film on the actual locations where his fact-based stories took place. Call Northside 777, for instance, was filmed in Chicago. The House on 92nd Street was filmed in Washington and New York. The Street With No Name--a clever forgery of the "based on fact" crime procedural--is set in "Central City," and was filmed on the streets of Los Angeles. In some ways, The Street With No Name is the most evocative of this trio because the filmmakers were free to to pick photogenic locations without worrying about verisimilitude. All three of these movies have a narration laying out the facts of the case for the audience.

The House on 92nd Street is the earliest of this trio and it is arguably a prototype of the form. It also offers the viewer the least amount of fun. The narration here is heavier than in the later movies, walking the audience through the case piece by piece. The main casualty of this structure is characterization. We don't really get to know our stalwart G-Men. The enemy agents are more colorful and stick in the mind longer. The film's lone concession to unreality is a transgendered twist at the end. The film is perhaps most interesting as a precursor to the John le Carre´-style spy thriller, with its mundane tricks of tradecraft and paranoid world of mundane spies. Made in 1945, the film still features Nazis as villains rather than communists, but this film is a harbinger of the Red Scare noir films in which conspiracies built by enemy agents circle around doomed protagonists. To an extent, this film functions as a propaganda reel for the FBI. I'm sure J. Edgar Hoover approved. He may even have been behind the crossdressing late in the film. Who knows?

I can imagine Zanuck tinkering with the formula between The House on 92nd Street and the other two films. Where the cast of the early film is strictly anonymous, with the occasional familiar character actor in a minor role (Leo G. Carroll, for example), both The Street With No Name and Call Northside 777 are dominated by big-name stars.

Call Northside 777 has the most star power of these films. James Stewart alone would insure that, but it also features significant roles for veteran scenery chewer Lee J. Cobb in a relatively restrained role as Stewart's editor and a fine turn by noir icon Richard Conte as the wrong man imprisoned. Stewart, says the collateral material provided with Fox's DVD, was in the process of darkening his image after the war. This was his third film since he returned to movies from the military. One can begin to see the outlines of the darker roles he would assay for Alfred Hitchcock and Anthony Mann in the coming decade. His reporter is a hard-boiled cynic at the outset, and fairly unsympathetic. The second half of the film softens this a bit and the crusading Mr. Smith comes to the surface in the final act. It's a fine performance. Also in a starring role is the penitentiary at Joliet, Illinois, where portions of the movie were shot. The prison--at the time a state of the art facility--had a unique circular layout that is a surprising piece of architectural styling when the camera enters the space. This is an example of Zanuck's insistence on filming on actual locations paying dividends, because a purpose-built set would not have had the same impact.

The Street With No Name is the most fun of these films because it doesn't have to hew to a "true" story. As such, it feels free to stage violent set pieces and places those set-pieces against a backdrop of the most photogenic parts of Los Angeles. Photogenic, that is, if you have an eye for the dark underbelly of the city. This is a backdrop of skid-row bars and seedy boxing clubs, of back alleys and deep shadows. The star of this film is Richard Widmark, still fresh from his star-making turn as Tommy Udo. He plays a different kind of psychopath here. No longer a giggling grotesque, Widmark dials things way back, presenting us with a calculating crime boss. His sole distinguishing mannerism is an addiction to nasal spray, which is characteristic of a hypochondriac. The supporting cast is good, featuring familiar faces like Ed Begely, Lloyd Nolan, and John McIntyre, but it gets blown off the screen by Widmark. This is especially true for nominal lead actor Mark Stevens, who seems out of his depth. The factory setting for the shoot-out that ends the film is a riot of odd shadows at even odder angles. Here, the film veers directly into the heart of film noir and abandons any pretense of naturalism. For that matter, the narrator of the film--the most overbearing of the narrators for this trio, it should be said--falls silent for the last act of the movie, much to the betterment of the picture.

5/29/06