THE STEEL TRAP (1952)

In the 1952 film The Steel Trap, a dissatisfied and bored Jim Osborne (Joseph Cotten) passes the hours dreaming up ways to embezzle from the bank where he has, for the past eleven years, toiled himself into a life of restless humdrum. Soon daydreams morph into actual preparation, and Jim waits for the right weekend to put his plan into action. If he can clean out the vault one Friday after everyone else has gone home, he’ll have until Monday morning before the cash is missed. A million bucks jammed into a suitcase later and it’s planes, trains, and automobiles in a mad dash for Brazil — with his unknowing wife Laurie (Teresa Wright, lovely as a blonde) in tow. But just like a cat with a ball of yarn though, fate steps in and toys with the escape plan — Mr. and Mrs. Osborne can’t seem to get out of the country. When at last it looks as if they can get clear, Laurie gets wise to the theft and heads straight back to sunny California. Facing the prospect of cooking, cleaning, and sleeping all by himself, Jim also reverses course in a desperate attempt to replace the loot before the bank reopens Monday morning…

The themes at play in The Steel Trap aren’t unusual; the movie stands on the shoulders of films such as Double Indemnity (1944), Pitfall (1948), and Roadblock (1951), where other bored men use desperate, reckless means to escape the monotony of their middle-class existence. Don Siegel’s Private Hell 36 (1954) and Mark Stevens’s feverish Time Table (1956) would continue the trend through the middle fifties. Judging by the popularity and preponderance of these tropes throughout the entire arc of the classic film noir period, we come to understand how these crime films were able to effectively offer counter the trumped-up veneer of optimism smeared over the postwar culture — including most of Hollywood’s film output.

Sans film noir movies, where could we explore in an effort to come to terms with an inescapable truth of those years: Not one that suggested that for most Americans the prosperity and material gain wasn’t possible, but that it simply wasn’t enough. Jim Osborne has all the ingredients those glossy magazine ads led him to believe were the recipe for happiness, as he says to a coworker:

“I was just thinking I’ve got a wonderful wife, a wonderful daughter, good health, a steady job, a reasonably secure future. I should be a pretty contented man.”

And yet he isn’t. In spite of all those things (not to mention a cute little bungalow and shiny new car) Jim’s life is vacant and without purpose, and he is unable to come to terms with his malaise. In reflecting upon his unhappiness he doesn’t seek renewal through increased commitment to his family, or to his community, or by considering a different, possibly more fulfilling career — like an addict, he just wants more. A gossamer, tenuous more. Somewhere else, somewhere exotic.

Writer-director Andrew Stone, who made a long career of musicals but switched to noir melodramas in the fifties, essentially treats The Steel Trap as a suspenser. It moves quickly and doesn’t waste many frames putting the money into Jim’s suitcase. Most of the running time is used up watching the Osbornes scramble to overcome a Kafka-esque series of roadblocks, while Jim grows ever more paranoid and tense. For the most part it works, but Jim’s interactions with a bevy of airline clerks (as well as an absurd scene with a U.S. customs agent) grows tedious, and finally brings to mind a much-loved Steve Martin and John Candy satire from an utterly different genre. Dimitri Tiomkin’s music is as good as expected but Oscar winner Ernest Laszlo’s cinematography is not. The Steel Trap only occasionally looks as good as Laszlo’s other film noirs, and a few of his set ups can only be described as, well, lazy. In the end this is a well-made and watchable film that nevertheless resonates more as a reflection of its time and issues than it does as pure entertainment or on the merits of its production.

Beyond the overarching themes, two additional moments in particular stood out to me: one keys off Jim’s opening narration, which informs the audience that his tenure at the bank has lasted for eleven years. Fifty-two minus eleven equals Pearl Harbor: Jim, embezzling bank manager, missed the big one. It seems that many of us have forgotten that 1952 was a time of war in the United States, but certainly it was front and center in the minds of ticket-buyers at the time, and the filmmakers inserted the detail as to not alienate all of those who would have naturally assumed that Jim had served. It’s also fair to suggest, as a friend just reminded me, that by being cast as a criminal Jim serves not only as a stand-in for all of those “home front connivers” that made life more difficult for everyone during both wars, but also as a representative of the pervasive corruption depicted in such films as The Captive City. 

If 1952 was a time of war, it was also the era of burgeoning television and of rampant McCarthyism. (In just two short years, the reckless senator himself would fall prey to the devilish little device.) A later moment is emblematic of Hollywood’s take on both: Laurie, rehashing her day, tells Osborne about service calls from three repairmen. The first wanted $18 to fix their floor model, the second $32. The third restored the set to perfect working order by tightening a loose wire and didn’t charge a dime. It’s a shrewdly timed jab at the costliness and potential risk of television ownership, coming just as the device was beginning to proliferate in the rural and suburban areas of the country. The conversation between husband and wife hints at an issue more deeply troubling than the honesty of TV repairmen however. At the point when Laurie says, “integrity seems to be a thing of the past, I’d even suspect my own brother,” we have no choice but to cast our eyes at the person seated next to us in the theater. She is the innocent in The Steel Trap, the moral center of the film. And if she has fallen victim to suspicion and paranoia of a nation under the spell of Joe McCarthy, what hope can there be for the rest of us?

In real life, dissatisfied men of a certain age blow their savings on sports cars or hair implants; maybe they even fool around. In the world of film noir they commit crimes. The vast majority of them, whether real or celluloid, eventually come to their senses. It takes abandonment for Jim Osborne to come to his. He wanders the streets of New Orleans deep into the twilight, deciding whether to board the plane headed back to L.A. or the one for Rio, contemplating the life that accompanies each ticket:

“I walked and I walked. And with each step I realized more and more what it meant to be a thief. A man without honor, without self respect, a man without a wife, without a daughter, without a home.”

As he approaches a flower seller, the film slips into an eerie montage showing the Osbornes as every bit the family from the magazine ads. Strangely though, the series of images plays against the outline of an orchid, and are saddened by an ethereal Ella Fitzgerald tune. The effect of the montage is to suggest that these memories can’t be easily recaptured, if at all. Nevertheless Jim tosses his cigarette into the gutter and makes for the airport. Yet in choosing to return to his old life (provided he can undo his crime) I wonder if he has come to understand what exactly made it feel so hollow in the first place, or if he has discovered some better way to move forward — because his potential new life looks exactly like his old one and his change in outlook seems somewhat less than earth shattering. In this The Steel Trap leaves us to ponder some troubling questions. Hopefully Jim knows the answers.  

The Steel Trap (1952)

Written and Directed by Andrew Stone

Produced by Bert Friedlob

Cinematography by Ernest Laszlo

Music by Dimitri Tiomkin

Starring Joseph Cotten and Teresa Wright

Released by 20th Century Fox

Running time: 85 minutes

THE TURNING POINT (1952)

Released in the same year as Robert Wise’s The Captive City, William Dieterle’s The Turning Point covers similar territory: The corrosive effect of the rackets on the post-war American way of life. The film’s primary mission was to deglamorize the mobster, to teach audiences that although racketeers may seem like legitimate businessmen who do little more nefarious than booking a few bets, they are in fact monsters with utter contempt for human life if it stands in the way of their rackets or their freedom from prosecution. Edmund O’Brien plays a law professor enlisted by the governor to lead a commission charged with investigating organized crime in the state’s largest city, as per real-life Senator Estes Kefauver. Given seemingly the same freedom as Elliot Ness to form his own team of racket-busters, O’Brien’s John Conroy recruits his reporter friend Jerry McKibbon, played by a perfectly cynical William Holden; Mandy, Conroy’s sweetheart and girl Friday; and finally his detective father. The problem is that unbeknownst to the younger Conroy, the elder Conroy is crooked, and mixed up with the same syndicate he’s been appointed to take down.

A few words about the girl are in order. Alexis Smith was never as well known as she deserved, and isn’t a household name today, if she ever was one — yet she was a good actress with a fine body of films to her credit. Her problem was that her rather contemporary style didn’t quite fit her era, and she probably would have been more bankable now than then. Nonetheless, she’s well cast here and delivers. Bookish, smart, wry, and a bit cool, she foils Holden’s natural cynicism — and while she clearly sees the world for what it is, her attraction to Conroy’s boyish idealism is entirely believable. It would have been difficult for another actress to play the part and not come off as either duplicitous or petty. It’s probably not fair to think of her as a femme fatale in The Turning Point, though someone prone to reaching might make the case. Her part in the film is essentially that of cheerleader to Conroy and conscience to McKibbon, and it’s after her prodding to do the right thing that he meets his ultimate end. She technically lures him to his doom, but her intentions were good.


The Turning Point smacks cynical from the get-go. No one actually believes that naïve do-gooder Conroy will make any hay, boyhood pal McKibbon thinks he’s destined to bang his head against the wall — the rackets are too well organized, run too deep, and after all — everyone likes to put down a bet once in a while — where’s the harm? It appears that all but Conroy himself know he’s little more than a gubernatorial poster boy for the coming election. In order to reinforce the everyday nature of corruption, and the idea that the modern gangster doesn’t sport a zoot suit or a violin case, the cockroach in The Turning Point has the banal name of Neil Eichelberger. Ed Begley, in a crackerjack, Oscar-worthy performance, brings Eichelberger vividly to life. Begley vacillates between stern, kindly, suave, and manic. He plays the crook as an upstanding middle-aged businessman, almost grandfatherly, who considers his criminal enterprise in business terms: people are going to bet, people need loans, someone has to take the bets and loan the money, why not me? He’s savvy, sophisticated, and manages avoid the typical movie cliché of underestimating his opponent. In fact, he recognizes early on that Conroy is able to get to him, and in a pivotal moment he responds to his adversary’s legal resolve with an act of cold brutality that is hardly matched elsewhere in film noir.


The important notion of the ease with which criminal forces can corrupt is represented by the elder Conroy (Tom Tully). Matt Conroy is basically good cop and decent man (after all, he raised one helluva son), who finally took the easy money after years of pounding the beat and seeing his family go without. In a lengthy monologue to McKibbon, he explains that he went crooked because a cop even has to “pay for his own bullets when he shoots a crook.” By the time he realized he was in over his head, it was too late to get out. The film’s best use of irony surfaces when Conroy is finally taken down by his own son, by the law school education his graft paid for all those years before. When he decides for his son’s sake to double-cross Eichelberger by copying incriminating files, he learns the extent of the mob’s influence — he’s ratted out by the lowly clerk at police headquarters. The scene in which he is killed is a gem. The syndicate boys contrive a grocery store heist just as Conroy passes by. He’s shot down by a hired gun just as he draws his service piece. The young thug is in turn silenced neat-as-you-please by two Eichelberger men concealed in the back of a truck and firing through a hole in a fruit crate. Taking place at street level in broad daylight, the scene has an elaborate, yet natural realism that’s heightened by the public nature of the action.


Another notable sequence is the televised Kefauver-style hearing that places Conroy and Eichelberger face to face. Clearly drawing inspiration from the real life hearings of 1950-1951, a Senatorial road show that visited a dozen cities and was viewed on television by an astonishing thirty million Americans, the actors and cameras bring to mind the real-life events of the source footage. O’Brien, shown in close profile, plays it tough, while Begley sweats, squirms, shrugs, and consults his attorney, hand covering the nearby microphone as flashbulbs explode in the background. It’s following the hearing that Eichelberger decides to get clear by destroying the books at the securities firm where he keeps all his proverbial dirty laundry. The problem is that Conroy is beginning to recognize the importance of Eichelberger’s connection to the brokerage, which is just a front for his loan sharking. Realizing that destroying the books themselves is tantamount to a confession, Eichelberger decides the best course of action will be to destroy the entire building. When his stooges remind him that dozens of families live in the floors over the firm, Eichelberger coolly points out the bright side: not even a jury would believe they’d kill all those people just to destroy the books. The fact that the crooks actually execute the plan is quite powerful, and meant to be so. It’s the sort of nefarious movie crime that we come to expect to be averted at the last moment — but it isn’t. In the aftermath, McKibbon and Conroy walk among the burning remains of the building in shock at the dead bodies strewn all around them. The effect is chilling, as the set up of Eichelberger’s character as a harmless businessman is revealed to be a sham.


Feeling guilt over his father’s death and the murder of the families in the building explosion — and with his idealism crushed, Conroy decides to give up. He’s brought back to his senses by a pep talk from McKibbon, who despite his rampant cynicism insists his pal finish what he started. McKibbon is also able to deliver the goods in another way: the widow of the man who shot Conroy’s father has information that can put Eichelberger in the little green room, if only they can find her. With Conroy’s determination renewed, McKibbon gets a call arranging a meeting at the fights, where he’ll learn the whereabouts of the missing girl, now the most sought after informant in the city. It’s a trap of course, and Eichelberger’s gang has hired a killer, in the form of iconic film noir heavy Neville Brand, to do the job on McKibbon at the arena. He succeeds, in another expertly filmed sequence, just as the missing girl stumbles into Conroy’s headquarters on her own, sealing the fate of Eichelberger. Conroy fails to make it to the arena in time to save his friend, and the film closes as he and Amanda walk down the deserted corridor of the arena, McKibbon’s words hanging over them: “Sometimes, someone has to pay an exorbitant price to uphold the majesty of the law.”

The Turning Point (1952)

Director: William Dieterle

Cinematographer: Lionel Lindon
Screenplay: Warren Duff
Story: Horace McCoy
Starring: William Holden, Edmund O’Brien, Alexis Smith, and Ed Begley
Released by: Paramount Pictures
Running time: 85 minutes

THE CAPTIVE CITY (1952)

For Robert Wise’s 1952 film The Captive City, former Time magazine scribe Alvin Josephy adapted his own short story of a crusading editor who discovers the big city rackets have quietly taken hold in his small corner of the world. The editor, Jim Austin, is played by television icon John Forsythe (Bachelor Father, Charlie’s Angels, Dynasty); while the wife is Cloris Leachman doppelgänger Joan Camden.

The story is told through flashbacks, and features the kind of opening sequence that was fairly common for the exposé pictures of the day. This one finds the senator from Tennessee, Estes Kefauver, speaking directly to the audience. Kefauver warns ticket buyers to be on guard, and that organized crime is an ever-expanding enterprise from which not even the most rural communities are safe. (Ironically, Kefauver didn’t get much traction as a racket buster, but he sure kicked the stuffing out of the comic book industry.)

On a superficial level, The Captive City is concerned with the obstacles Jim Austin must overcome to root out the corruption taking hold in his town. But where the movie scores as a film noir is through its cynical depiction of the townspeople and their willingness to accept organized crime as part of their daily existence. Austin is a man apart. The town’s lethargic response to his clean-up efforts doesn’t come from fear of mafia violence or shakedowns, but instead from the community’s acceptance of gambling and graft as a necessary—in some cases welcome—part of modern life. The story’s take on the banality of cynicism in postwar America is one of the most unusual in all of film noir.

Ordinary townsfolk keep telling Austin to mind his own business: his business partner, advertisers, cops, and even his wife, after she’s confronted in the street. His pup photographer takes a beating, and only then does the boy’s mother decide to give Austin a piece of her mind. The film does very little to dispel the general attitude that crime is an inescapable fact of modern life, as common as a newspaper tossed into a thorn bush or flies getting in through the screen door. Inevitable, but only annoying.

Surprisingly, the film boasts just a pair of murder victims, two supporting characters who come forward as potential whistle-blowers, both conspicuous in how the movie presents them. Both are outcasts, the most maladjusted townspeople in the movie. The first is a broken-down and discredited investigator who takes divorce work in order to keep the lights on; the other is the drunken ex-wife of the city’s chief bookie. The gray milieu of noir asks us to carefully examine their motives. Are they concerned citizens who care about their civic duty, or are they revenge-seekers with an axe to grind? Regardless, it is made clear that the collective inability of these “misfits” to conform to the community’s general culture of malaise is what really gets them killed.

Although at its heart The Captive City is an exposé picture, its bleak world view, extraordinary cynicism, and pervasive malaise make it an important film noir. There isn’t a moment in the picture that shows the negative effects of corruption on the citizenry. The only characters who suffer harm are the ones that stick their necks out. This unrepentantly bleak outlook is reinforced at the end, when the viewer is surprisingly denied the chance to share in Austin’s ultimate success. When he finally arrives in Washington DC to testify at the senate hearings, we are denied admittance to the chamber—the door is quite literally slammed in our face. We are even begrudged the small pleasure of seeing the gangsters who doggedly chased the Austins across the country get what they deserve. They melt back into the crowds, forgotten by the film and by law enforcement. The film refuses to give us a Hollywood ending, even though (for once) we really want one. Instead we are left with Kefauver, who offers a final message so hollow that it would suck the air out of any would-be do-gooder: that in the wake of his efforts to protect his town, the real Jim Austin is out there somewhere, anonymous, but “still alive.” 

One final note: It’s worth pointing out that poster for The Captive City, a film that deals with the Italian mafia, clearly anticipates the artwork of the dust jacket and movie poster for The Godfather by almost twenty years.

The Captive City (1952)

Director: Robert Wise

Screenplay: Alvin Josephy

Starring: John Forsythe, Joan Camden, Harold Kennedy, Victor Sutherland, Marjorie Crossland, and Ray Teal.

Released by: United Artists

Running time: 90 minutes

2/14, 8/17