LOOPHOLE (1954)

Take it easy. If you’re innocent you’ve got no worries.

Yeah? Well, I am innocent. I got plenty of worries.

Allied Artists’ Loophole is one of the numerous exercises in “it could happen to you” storytelling that surfaced in the noir films of the McCarthy era. With obvious parallels to the red baiting of the day, it served to remind 1954 audiences that not all was well in the world, and that innocence didn’t immunize any citizen from persecution. Even in its final moments, after order has presumably been restored to the world, it irresistibly subverts the “happily ever after” endings of mainstream Hollywood films. Yet Loophole’s noir ethos doesn’t begin and end merely with the theme of fate dealing its hero a rotten hand — in this case a bank teller wrongly suspected of grand theft. As a film that brokers in the attainability of the American Dream, much of its conceptual darkness comes not from the unfair circumstances thrust upon the hero, but instead from its depiction of the man responsible for the hero’s misfortune. He is neither a bank robber nor a police officer, but a sociopathic insurance investigator long since bereft of his judgment. One can argue that this man, played vividly by the iconic Charles McGraw, is the real noir protagonist in Loophole.

On the surface it’s a pleasant-enough B movie, with a good cast, fair production values, and strong story concept. Barry Sullivan is Mike Donovan, teller at the Hollywood branch of the Capital National Bank. Mike’s a regular guy if ever there was one: he fought the war, married the girl next door, and then settled down in one of those post-war bungalows in the city where the sun always shines. As Loophole opens, Mike is happily ensconced in the American Dream. One Friday, a team of federal auditors gives the bank its annual checkup. However, a thief named Herman Tate (Don Beddoe, looking as dowdy as a character named Herman ought to) is posing as one of the examiners; with the help of his sexy girlfriend Vera (Mary Beth Hughes), he manages to swipe almost fifty grand while Mike’s back is turned. When his end-of-the-day numbers refuse to add up, the terrified teller leaves for the weekend without informing his supervisor. He comes clean Monday morning, but it’s too late — he already looks guilty. If the missing cash isn’t found, the insurance company will have to make good. They dispatch ex-cop Gus Slavin (McGraw) to investigate, and he’s dead certain Mike is at the center of an inside job. The FBI and LAPD are brought in, and although they eventually come to believe his story, Slavin remains unmoved, convinced that if he can keep Mike unemployed he will eventually have to use the stolen money to pay his bills. Since he really is innocent, Mike is forced to sell his house and take a menial job as a cab driver. As the insurance company’s payoff deadline approaches, Slavin increases the pressure, until Mike realizes that in order to get out from under, he has to nail the crooks on his own.

We often forget that the characters of classic film noir survived not only the Second World War, but the Great Depression as well. Although the postwar years were characterized by growing prosperity and wealth, those enjoying it were intimately familiar with dire circumstances. If nothing else, Loophole shows us how two men with diametrically opposed outlooks cope with life in these supposedly better times. Films such as this one quietly whispered to audiences that the American Dream isn’t guaranteed — that our happiness can be taken away in the blink of an eye. Mike Donovan isn’t the Swede or Jeff Bailey— he doesn’t have it coming. Yet unlike those characters he staves off morbidity and cynicism, maintaining his sense of optimism throughout the film. Mike is part of the system: married to a faithful wife, working steady, and making payments; he’s not on the run from some inescapable past. And when the going gets tough Mike and his wife Ruth (Oscar winner Dorothy Malone) stick together — and eventually triumph. Years later they will most likely remember their ordeal as a bump in the road, something to chuckle about over roast beef with Ed Sullivan. Looking at Loophole from this perspective, it hardly rates as a film noir. It even seems opposed to some of the notions that we consider definitive. Yet it is a noir, achieving that status through the more subtle characterization of Gus Slavin, who, unlike Mike, has not been able to successfully conform to the fifties status quo.

All we know about Slavin’s past is that he “resigned” from the LAPD, but we never learn why (though early on when he coldly remarks that “What [Mike] needs is a taste of rubber hose,” we get an idea). Although Slavin resembles the noir protagonist (neurotic, obsessive, anti-social, alienated) more closely than Mike does, he isn’t the hero of the film. He pursues his suspect as implacably as any single-minded protagonist from T-Men or Appointment with Danger, but unlike them he fails to “get his man” in the end. Why not? The answer lies in Slavin’s great flaw: his inability to differentiate between the guilty and the innocent, brought about by his failure to conform to societal mores. We know that Mike is innocent — after all we witnessed Herman’s crime — and yet, while the FBI and LAPD officers working the case can plainly see his innocence, Slavin can’t. It’s this pathological presumption of guilt that undoubtedly cost him his police job, and Slavin is incapable of learning from his past mistakes. He is a stubborn man who has fallen from the razor’s edge, and has lost that part of his self that allowed him to function in a rational world. The film’s most fascinating moment is it’s final one, when an exonerated Mike, restored to his job at the bank, looks up from his orderly column of figures to see Slavin inexplicably lurking outside his window — as the narrator confides that once again “Mike Donovan’s sitting on top of the world …… or is he?” It’s in this moment, when we recognize that there will always be Gus Slavins in the world, that we begin to wonder if it’s possible to ever truly be safe.

Loophole (1954)

Directed by Bud Schuster

Produced by Warren Douglas 

Story by Dwight V. Babcock and George Bricker

Screenplay by Warren Douglas

Cinematography by William A. Sickner

Starring Barry Sullivan, Dorothy Malone, and Charles McGraw

Released by Allied Artists Pictures

Running time: 80 minutes

One last note: The image on the film’s poster is a sham. At no point in the film does Barry Sullivan ever hold a satchel full of money. 

HONG KONG CONFIDENTIAL (1958)

Gene Barry, who made his mark on television as the star of such popular programs as Bat Masterson and Burke’s Law, plays an undercover CIA man on the trail of a kidnapped Arabian prince in the ultra low-budget back-lot thriller Hong Kong Confidential.


With a title like that, how can you resist? From New York, L.A. and Chicago to High School, put the word confidential in your title and count me in. Hong Kong Confidential is the strangest bird in the nest, a 1958 cheapie that clocks in at barely over an hour. There’s not too much meat on these bones, so this review will be as spare as the film.


The set up is as contrived as it is confusing: the American and Soviet governments are both wooing Thamen, some speck of a fictional country in the Middle East, “at the mouth of the Suez canal,” as a spot for an ICBM site. To tip the scales in their favor the reds kidnap the son of the emir in an effort to force the king to ally his country with them (Interesting logic, huh?). Historically a friend of the U.S., the emir receives an “anonymous note” in the wake of the kidnapping demanding that he abandon talks with the Americans and instead embrace the Soviets. He responds with an ultimatum to the CIA: find the crown prince in two weeks or he’ll jump in bed with the commies.


The intelligence service discovers a lead in Hong Kong, and they put their main far eastern asset on the case: one Casey Reed (Gene Barry), lounge singer extraordinaire. Barry gets through this by chewing every piece of cardboard scenery on the back lot sets. He’s over the top the whole way through, but his hammy performance is part of the reason Hong Kong Confidential qualifies as a campy delight. His character manages to track down those involved with the kidnapping, though their guilt isn’t established until the final moments of the movie — all along agent Reed simply has them pegged as baddies and goes after them for no other reason.


The film features women from both sides of the tracks. Allison Hayes plays the mysterious Elena Martine, smuggler and chief bad girl. Hayes is sexy as can be — in an overtly trashy sort of way. She’s that rare actress who manages to look good in hot pants, even at her normal height — later in 1958 Hayes becomes an American pop culture when she immortalized Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. IMDb also tells us that Hayes, like me, is a West Virginian, though unlike me, she got her big break as a Miss America contestant. On the flipside is all-American blonde Beverly Tyler, who plays Barry’s partner in his lounge act: he croons, she’s parked behind the piano. Tyler has no idea that her guy leads a secret life, and she’s devastated when he breaks up the act and heads for Macao. Of course she follows, and in true B-script fashion ends up as a captive of the other woman and her crew of cronies.


Unlike most of the other Confidential films this one isn’t by any means a noir, though on paper it might be confused for one: cheap production values, moody lighting (in some scenes), a bad girl, a rogue hero, and voiceover narration are all present; though there’s none of the determined fatalism, cynicism, or pervasive sense of doom that defines the noir picture. Hayes’s character is certainly bad, but she never manages to pull the wool of Barry’s eyes and couldn’t possibly be described as a femme fatale. The narration here is fascinating — unlike most films that use the device to provide some set-up or let us in the hero’s thoughts, Hong Kong Confidential employs voiceover for purely economical reasons: the narrator fills in story gaps. His omniscient voice chimes in regularly to tie together scenes, and fill viewers in on aspects of the story that are not filmed as scenes — talk about cheap!


The sets are strictly from hunger, clearly trumped-up back-lot hand-me-downs. Nevertheless, cinematographer Ken Peach does a good job with them, and while the film doesn’t have a distinct visual style it does have a few excellent moments of darkness and light. Peach did not have a noteworthy career, though ironically he did film the more noir-ish Chicago Confidential, and well as the fine Ruth Roman / Sterling Hayden vehicle Five Steps to Danger. In another bit of odd coincidence, director Edward Cahn is himself credited with the 1935 film Confidential. Cahn’s filmography is extraordinary, check it out here. It might just be me, but I can’t read a list of titles such as his and not salivate to see each and every one of them. The biggest talent in the crew had to be art director Bill Glascow, who decorated some iconic film noirs — Kiss Me Deadly in particular, and would later earn an Oscar nomination for Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte.


Hong Kong Confidential is a small, fun, campy thing. It doesn’t take itself very seriously and doesn’t expect you to. One look at the poster and you’ll know you’re in for a fun ride — or at least that Gene Barry is a fan of the squatting position, and he holds his .38 like a steak knife. Possibly the best thing about it is its availability. And don’t forget to be careful — the guy beside you at the bar might be listening.


Hong Kong Confidential (1958)

Directed by Edward L. Cahn
Produced by Robert Kent
Written by Orville Hampton
Starring Gene Barry and Allison Hayes
Cinematography by Ken Peach
Art Direction by William Glascow
Released by United Artists
Running time: 67 minutes.

THE FEARMAKERS (1958)

Dana Andrews is one of the more iconic actors of the film noir cycle, yet in the grand scheme of things he’s one of the most underappreciated in film history. The image of him standing amidst the hulking carcasses of bombers at the end of The Best Years of Our Lives is so viscerally powerful that the thought of brings tears to my eyes. I’ve always admired him as a “film first” kind of guy, meaning that he never allowed his ego to get in the way of his characters. “Low key” for him wasn’t a vapid Hollywood actor’s false modesty; it was his personal way of exploring character and demonstrating faith in his audience’s ability to empathize. He was a fairly regular Joe who suffered through the ups and downs of life as most people do, though it can be argued that he had more than his share of bad luck. That he struggled mightily with alcohol in the years after his career began to decline isn’t surprising—less was known of alcoholism in those days when the evening cocktail was an intrinsic part of American culture. It didn’t help that in 1935 he buried a young wife, and then in 1964 their child. He worked as he found it in his later years and died without fanfare in the early 1990s. His body of work is extraordinary, and it’s easy to imagine that his screen persona was probably not much different than the man in real life.

Oddly, one of the roles for which I best remember him is as Ted Stryker from 1957’s Zero Hour!. In the film, famously lampooned in Airplane!, Andrews plays a neurotic WWII fighter pilot who can’t get past the guilt he feels over the deaths of his squadron members. Years later, Stryker gets his shot at redemption aboard a commercial flight that is bedeviled by food poisoning. (“Don’t order the fish!”) The film depicts Andrews as a shaky, sweat-drenched wreck—he may even be a coward. But by the final fade-out he’s a hero—albeit a reluctant one. You leave thinking that had anyone else been able to fly the plane, Andrews would have kept his ass strapped in row F. Even as the flight crew asks if anyone on board has flight experience, he keeps quiet. It isn’t until his ailing son volunteers that his “pop flew in the war” that Andrews grudgingly acknowledges his personal history. The guy in the control tower is, of all people, Sterling Hayden. The hulking actor browbeats Andrews through his ordeal until the plane alights on the tarmac. Even then, Stryker is denied that moment of movie heroic adulation that eighties action film heroes were willing to destroy block after city block to achieve. Instead of a rousing ovation, the distressed passengers seem joyously relieved that a schmuck like Stryker didn’t get them all killed. The film’s treatment of Stryker is lukewarm and ultimately disappointing, yet Andrews brings the role the same level of professionalism and dignity evident that defined his career.

Shortly after Zero Hour! Andrews and director Jacques Tourneur made two films together, The Night (Curse) of the Demon—which everyone and his ma has seen—and the obscure The Fearmakers, a communist exposé picture situated in the world of DC lobbyists and public relations firms. Andrews plays Alan Eaton, an old-school PR executive who believes his firm’s primary function is merely to ascertain public opinion—not manipulate it. But Eaton has been a prisoner of war in North Korea for the past few years, relentlessly beaten and tortured. The opening credits roll over top of one of his beatings, and the film’s first real scene takes place on Eaton’s flight back to the States. It’s here that he meets a “fellow traveler,” nuclear physicist Dr. Gregory Jessup, who preaches nuclear disarmament and warns Eaton that PR companies have begun to manipulate public opinion far more often than they reflect it. He cites as an example how the big tobacco companies have begun to employ PR firms to help them explain away medicine’s claims that cigarettes are the cause of “certain malignant ailments.” Jessup just so happens to be looking for a good PR man and asks Eaton for his contact information.

Let’s pause for a second. The close-read of this scene is that Jessup is a communist—the fact that he’s stumping for disarmament is a dead giveaway. This notion has confused some who have commented on this film in recent years, as if the filmmakers are suggesting that anyone with a “no-nukes” bumper sticker must be a Red. These folks fail to grasp that Jessup’s position doesn’t suggest that communists are peace-lovers who despise nuclear power—it’s merely the movie’s way of showing the audience that he’s a clever liar. The film’s actual attitude however, if viewed through the lens of the late 1950s, makes a great deal more common sense. Jessup really wants to use Eaton’s PR firm to spread a no-nukes message, so that the communists can speed ahead of the United States in the burgeoning arms race. Remember that nuclear stockpiling was only just beginning in earnest, and that American views about the defense program were by-and-large pro-nuke, and not yet as fatalistic as they would become in subsequent decades. That’s an attitude the Soviets would have liked to change. After all, this was the atomic age. In the minds of many, the Fat Man and Little Boy detonations had saved the lives of thousands and thousands of US servicemen; deeper implications allowed by the passage of time weren’t yet part of the public consciousness.

In the same year The Fearmakers was in theaters, the Ford Motor Company was fervently developing a nuclear-powered concept car, complete with onboard reactor. The excess of the buildup was still in the offing, and the “bomb” remained an essentially American concept. When The Fearmakers debuted the Soviets had possessed nuclear capability for only eight years, and lagged behind in the associated technology. Even by 1964, the US held in reserve 7,000 warheads to only 500 for the Soviets. The truly frightening concept of remote delivery hadn’t yet taken hold either, though in October of ‘57 the Russians would deploy Sputnik via the first functional ICBM, changing attitudes forever. With all of this in mind, Jessup’s pitch to Eaton is a logical ploy: let’s get a respected American PR man to sway public opinion in the direction of disarmament, while in the meantime we secretly catch up to the US in the arms race. Of course communists would want to sow the seeds of disarmament in America—and Andrew’s Eaton is perfect for the job: he’s naïve, rattled, and has possibly even been programmed to be sympathetic by his North Korean / Chinese captors.

It also seems to be a plot contrivance of the first order that Jessup would happen to be on the same plane as Eaton in the first place, but we later learn he’s a plant. As it turns out, Eaton’s former business partner died under mysterious circumstances just after exercising his power of attorney and selling the their PR firm to a third man, Jim McGinnis (Dick Foran), an unscrupulous, greedy chap. McGinnis in it for the money and doesn’t care much who he works for or what political agenda he asked to spin. The film’s depictions of the PR racket falls well short of its clever take on the DC attitudes that find their locus in the vicinity of Connecticut Avenue and K Street. (Take my word for it, I paid my dues there in my early twenties. The only thing I remember with any fondness is the “L Street Chicken” sandwich at Jonathan’s Gourmet Deli.) Despite the fact that Eaton and Baker is one of the most respected agencies inside the Beltway, nobody seems to actually work there. McGinnis’ only employees are right hand man Barney Bond (played like a weasel in coke bottle glasses by crooner Mel Tormé) and secretary Ms. Dennis (amateurish Marilee Earle). The empty office is likely a product of the movie’s low budget, but it requires Tormé and Earle to pull their weight, and both fall short. Earle in particular is far, far out of her depth.

Eaton of course knows none of this—he expects to return to the company that he built from the ground up and resume his old life. Instead he gets hit by a ton of bricks: not only is his former partner long dead and gone, despite seeing that his name is still on the door, he’s shocked to discover that the business has been sold out from under him. (McGinnis kept the name for the strength of its reputation) McGinnis recognizes that Eaton still has some juice, so he offers him the chance to “write his own ticket” if only he can secure the account of a senator whose business was lost when McGinnis took over. Eaton agrees, but when he meets with the senator and a reporter friend, they give him the dope on who McGinnis really fronts for.

Horrified, Eaton becomes an impromptu double agent and works to bring McGinnis to justice. Why? Because his name is still on the letterhead, and in his mind that makes him responsible for whatever the company has become in his absence. And although Eaton endured hell in Korea he’s still compelled somehow to do the right thing. Yet not surprisingly, he decides that as soon as he can untangle this mess he’s getting out of the DC rat race and heading for an easier life in California. Eaton has no desire to return his company to its former level of respectability—he knows a lost cause when he sees it. The Fearmakers wraps up with a series of conventional movie run-ins with colorful communist agents in various guises, and all’s well that ends well. The end titles find Eaton and Ms. Dennis necking at the feet of Abraham Lincoln.

As much as The Fearmakers can be praised for being conceptually ahead of its time, its fails to understand that not all criminal enterprise is violent. The movie is about how politicians and the power-hungry conspire to corrupt the truth, yet the notion must have been deemed too obtuse for 1950s audiences, because in the end the filmmakers reduce the crooks to mere thugs with fists and guns.Though, more importantly, it could be that those 1958 audiences were still clinging to a make-believe world where a lone good man could trumpet down the walls of Jericho. My god, how the world has changed. 

The Fearmakers (1958)

Director: Jacques Tourneur

Cinematographer: Sam Leavitt
Screenplay: Chris Appley and Elliot West, based on the novel by Darwin Teilhet.
Starring: Dana Andrews, Dick Foran, Mel Tormé.
Released by: United Artists
Running time: 85 minutes

8/17

WORLD FOR RANSOM (1954)

You’re no Galahad.

(Spoilers abound) World for Ransom is a clunker, but a fun one with a some upside. A youthful Robert Aldrich shot it in under two weeks for next to nothing, which is a bit less surprising when you take into account that the production took advantage of all of the sets and some of the performers from Dan Duryea’s hard to find China Smith television series, the popularity of which this was created to cash in on. Aldrich himself had even cut his teeth on a few episodes of the series. Interestingly, no director is credited—take that as a sign. 

World for Ransom rates as a film noir on the strength of Duryea’s character, a typical noir antihero. Mike Callahan is a basically decent fellow who moves with ease and experience through the criminal underworld of the Orient, occasionally breaking the law himself. At his core, he lives according to a set of moral absolutes that revolve around doing the honorable thing. Even in a film as slight and inconsequential as this one, the notion of the “existential samurai” (which is how I often think of the noir / hardboiled / detective film protagonist), is realized rather vividly through Duryea. It’s in this, as well as Joe Biroc’s sharp camera work, that World for Ransom has value.

Despite backlot filming with repurposed sets and props, Joe Biroc was gives World for Ransom a distinctive visual style that holds up against many more highly regarded film noirs. Without his work and Duryea’s charisma, this would be just another forgettable poverty row programmer. Biroc is one of those Hollywood types who no one, not even film buffs, seems to remember, despite an extraordinary body of work. He shot his first film in 1929 and his last in 1987. That’s a career that touched seven decades and included such films as It’s A Wonderful Life, Red Planet Mars, The Amazing Colossal Man, Bye Bye Birdie, Viva Las Vegas, Blazing Saddles, Airplane and many more good movies. Like any director of photography that’s worth his salt, Biroc uses his shots in this film to reinforce character development. Here he consistently captures Duryea in a way that suggests the claustrophobic and densely layered underworld his character inhabits. Duryea is often stuck between areas of extreme light and shadow, obscured by louvered windows and grates, or caught from areas of concealment. Mike Callahan is situated in a world of intrigue and danger. 



The story is trite, so don’t be fooled by a poster that evokes the Ringling Brothers and promises as much excitement. Having watched this twice, I can assure you that the stakes are pretty low, there’s no “incredible plot to destroy the world.” What we get instead is a convoluted mess of international intrigue surrounding the kidnapping of one of the world’s leading H-Bomb men. This idea of a Shanghai job on a nuclear scientist toyed with the atomic-age audience’s fear that somehow capturing a lone scientist and ransoming him to the Soviets could jeopardize the fate of the world. It gins up a shot of pre-bottled tension that the script would never be able to generate by other means.

Callahan gets pulled into the case when he learns that his longtime pal from the British army, Julian (Patric Knowles), is somehow mixed up in the kidnapping. He is also carrying a torch for lounge singer Frennessey, who just so happens to be Julian’s girl. Callahan’s secretly hoping that by pulling his buddy’s fat from the fire, the songbird will see the error of her ways and choose him instead. In the best noir tradition, the hero has blinders on wherever women are concerned. Frennessey embodies the inner turmoil in Callahan’s character: he desires her and the glossy magazine ad fantasy life she represents, but she’s attached to the pal that his system of values tells him that he must save, even if it costs him a chance with the girl. Callahan’s code determines his course of action whether he likes it or not. It’s in this determined fatalism that he embodies film noir.

Most of the remaining action concerns Callahan’s efforts to stay one step ahead of the British Colonial Police as he searches for the scientist. After a climactic gun and grenade battle at the jungle hideout of the crooks, in which the now completely corrupt Julian is killed, Callahan returns to Frennessey, only to be spurned. The femme-fatale’s reassurances of her rekindled love for Callahan were merely a ruse to enlist his aid in the safe return of her lover. The film ends as Callahan, crushed not by violence but by his unrequited obsession, vanishes in the fog-shrouded streets of seedy bars, opium dens, and fortunetellers.

World for Ransom (1954)
Director: none credited (Robert Aldrich)
Cinematographer: Joseph Biroc
Screenplay by Lindsay Hardy and Hugo Butler
Starring Dan Duryea, Gene Lockhart, Patric Knowles, and Marian Carr
Released by Allied Artists
Running time: 78 minutes

I WAS A COMMUNIST FOR THE FBI (1951)

In 1945 John E. Rankin, the long serving, bombastic, and racist congressman from Mississippi stated “one of the most dangerous plots ever instigated for the overthrow of this government has its headquarters in Hollywood … the greatest hotbed of subversive activities in the United States.” As the conflagration in Europe finally came to an end, only to be replaced by the Cold War, the rug was yanked out from under the burgeoning domestic communist movement by men such as Rankin, anxious to combat any threat (real or not so much) to the sanctity of the American way of life. The American Communist Party, which had previously been a refuge for certain naïve intellectuals and politicos in the movie industry quickly became the focus of the greatest paranoid witch hunt of modern age. Writers, stars, moguls, and other assorted Hollywood players traveled east to testify before congress. Some named names and some refused — but everyone got hurt. The Hollywood Ten went to prison, Edward G. Robinson became “number one on the sucker list,” Bogart took his hat in hand, and the extraordinary John Garfield was destroyed.

Throughout the years of HUAC and the Blacklist, the film industry was placed squarely on the defensive, saddled with the massive public relations task of restoring faith in the movie business. In addition to shunning those tainted by the witch hunt, the studios began cranking out dozens of anti-communism pictures. Possibly the foremost example of these films is 1951’s I Was A Communist for the F.B.I.

The real-life inspiration for the film was Pittsburgh steelworker Matt Cvetic. When the war broke out Cvetic was deemed too short for military service and sent home. He subsequently decided to serve his country by becoming an informant for the F.B.I., and spent the next nine years posing as a communist party member in the western Pennsylvania steel mills, giving the Feds all the dirt he could churn up. According to most news sources of the day, Cvetic’s dedication and sacrifice was truly heroic: he had to live his cover day and night, lest he be found out. In addition to his reputation, it cost him almost every relationship in his life, including those with his wife and children. His only confidants were his priest and the G-Men to whom he reported.

In the end, Cvetic went public to HUAC and became an overnight celebrity. Magazine articles, books, a radio show starring Dana Andrews, and the Saturday Evening Post all told his story. Like so many others unprepared for sudden notoriety, Cvetic handled things poorly. He failed to salvage a life with his family, slipped into alcoholism, and died at the young age of 52. The precise details his recruitment by the F.B.I. and the extent of his contribution are the subject of much debate, and seemingly lost to history — though if nothing else his exploits provided the fodder for I Was A Communist for the F.B.I., a film so important to the Hollywood film collective that it was nominated for the 1952 Academy Awards in the Best Documentary Feature category, though it’s about as much a documentary as On the Waterfront.

Though Pittsburgh’s place in the hierarchy of American urban centers has waned over the decades, in the mid-20th century its position as the focal point of the nation’s industrial might is inarguable. According to the film, our reliance on coal and steel made Pittsburgh the ideal place for the communist party to gain a foothold from which to “weaken America’s industrial heart.” The movie covers the last few months of Cvetic’s nine years “in the red,” as he progresses from resolutely shouldering his burden to finally restoring his name at HUAC hearings in New York. Most of the scenes are episodic, intended to shine a light on the subtle ways in which communists operate. It’s impressive how well (and ironically, how subtly) the exposé-style propaganda elements are inserted into an otherwise entertaining and suspenseful narrative.

Despite the far more important political and historical underpinnings, I Was A Communist for the F.B.I. is stylistically a film noir. Matt Cvetic, played by Frank Lovejoy, has much in common with the typical noir anti-hero. He leads a double life that is entirely defined by his alienation from the rest of society. He’s a natural loner, possessing some force of will enabling him to endure extreme hardship and isolation from everyone else — even contempt from those he loves. Some attempt is made to give the movie a femme fatale in the form of high school teacher Eve Merrick (Dorothy Hart), but it doesn’t last. Merrick, secretly a communist, is ordered by her masters to romance Cvetic and find out if he is for real — all important party officials must be watched. Instead, she turns in her fatale identity for that of a damsel in distress after witnessing a brutal beating and attempting to flee the party. When the red gangsters send goons to keep her quiet, Cvetic is forced to blow his cover in order to save her.

Films such as I Was A Communist for the F.B.I. are obviously products of their special moment in time, yet the mid-century period is one of the most fascinating and disturbing in our history — for reasons more substantial and deeply felt than the infiltration of subversives in Hollywood. A fact not lost on screenwriter Crane Wilbur, who uses one of the film’s episodes to remind the moviegoing public that racial tension was an equally distressing issue in 1951 —though it could be argued that by placing communists behind racial violence he blurs the issue for the benefit of the movie industry and consequently does more harm than good. The scene shows party organizers inciting black factory workers to riot, in hopes of getting fat on the millions to be had from a sham legal defense fund. What’s disturbing and ironic is that after the communist blowhard makes his pitch to the assembly, only one black man questions his motives — and he’s quickly shouted down by his friends. (Evocative of 1947’s Violence, and in some ways also 1950’s The Underworld Story) The film not only frighteningly suggests that these workers really are as gullible as the communists believe, it then corroborates its position by crediting the 1943 race riots in Harlem and Detroit to communist agitators using the same methods.

Although I Was A Communist for the F.B.I. is in many ways a problematic film, everything that makes it problematic today contributed to its success with audiences in 1951 — and therefore the hard-to-find film remains a provocative document of a troubled time.

I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951)

Director: Gordon Douglas
Cinematographer: Edwin DuPar
Writer: Crane Wilbur
Starring: Frank Lovejoy and Dorothy Hart
Distributed by: Warner Brothers
Running time: 83 minutes