Genre 
Index

Home

Crime Wave, 1954, directed by Andre De Toth. Gene Nelson, Sterling Hayden, Phyllis Kirk, Charles Bronson, Ted de Corsia, Jay Novello.

Synopsis: Ex-con Steve Lacey is in a tight spot. Ever since his release from San Quentin, he's been trying to toe the straight and narrow with his new bride. Unfortunately, three of his ex-cellmates have busted out and gone on a crime spree. After a botched gas-station hold-up, in which one of them has been shot, they show up on Lacey's doorstep expecting him to help them out. When he balks, they coerce him. Worse, police detective Lt. Sims is keeping an eye on him. In Sims's eye, once a con always a con, and he's not about to cut Lacey any slack. The plan is a bank job, with Lacey as the getaway driver. If he refuses, his new wife will pay the price...

Mean Streets: Crime Wave is damn near a perfect B-movie. It's tightly wound, starkly beautiful in spite of being cheap as hell, and exactly the right length at 73 minutes. There's not an ounce of fat on this film, and yet it still provides a vivid gallery of characters and a complete dramatic arc. The element that should give the whole thing away--the location shooting in the slums of Los Angeles--turns into an asset in the hands of ace cinematographer Bert Glennon. Glennon was a favorite of John Ford and he was a big part of the reason that Howard Hawks once said, "John Ford could command the skies; the rest of us have to use soundstages." Glennon puts that command of environments to striking use here. One would think that the use of locations would lend Crime Wave a kind of kitchen sink gritty realism, but it doesn't. It serves to accentuate the weird abstraction director Andre de Toth gets from the way he frames his shots, and from the hyper-stylized noir performances of the actors.

Sterling Hayden is the big name in the cast (unless you count an early character turn by Charles Bronson as one of our villainous thugs), and his performance sets the tone for the movie. He's slightly off-kilter, speaking his lines in a cadence that suggests the abstraction of hardboiled tough guys rather than naturalistic dialogue. At the director's suggestion, Hayden substitutes toothpicks for cigarettes for his signature piece of business; he chews through a bunch of them as the movie progresses, damn near an entire forest of them. The two innocents caught in the middle of the conflict between cops and robbers are Gene Nelson and Phyllis Kirk (who also starred in de Toth's House of Wax). Both are superb.

The story arc has our two heroes stuck in a dual trap. First, they're caught in the uncaring dragnet of a manhunt, with Hayden's character as their primary bete noir. In the second, they're snared by the classic film noir construction of a checkered past invading the present and dragging them back into a life of crime. I don't know that Crime Wave would qualify as film noir, though. It dissipates the doom at the end, with the black beast turned white and with all the snares evaded. It's positively sunny in the end. But that's okay. It's still a crackerjack film, and even with that sunny disposition waiting at the end, it still manages to lift the lid off the city primeval in order to watch the cockroaches scatter.

10/04/07