HIGHWAY 301 (1950)

“You cannot be kind to congenital criminals like these. They would show you no mercy. Let them feel the full impact of the law.”

Back in the days before the no-holds-barred speedway/parking lot that is Interstate 95, sun-seekers in their Nash Ramblers and Studebaker Champions trekked from Baltimore to Florida on U.S. 301. In the 1950 Warner Bros. noir, Highway 301, a ruthless band of killers known as the “Tri-State Gang” exploit the thoroughfare’s easy on-easy off access to engage in that most American of crimes: kicking over banks.

The leader of the outfit is played by Steve Cochran, a good-looking and underestimated actor who could do more than the critics of his day were willing to acknowledge. Cochran could be boyish and naïve in one picture and a greasy scumbag in another; in Highway 301 he creates a legitimately terrifying screen persona, most certainly influenced by Jimmy Cagney’s neurotic turn in the previous year’s White Heat, in which Cochran co-starred. Here, Cochran borrows from the older actor and still manages to keep him at arm’s length. Unlike Cody Jarrett, Cochran’s George Legenza murders so casually that the film’s heartbeat barely flutters whenever he squeezes the trigger. Yet despite the actor’s idyllic good looks and his wardrobe of switchblade-sharp suits, there’s zero glamour to be found in this evocation of the criminal life. The Tri-State mob live out their doomed lives in a series of cheap roadside flops, greasy spoons, and chop suey palaces. Hustling from place to place, all cigarette smoke and nervous sweat, crammed five or six to a car, going nowhere.

If you can get your hands on a copy (Warner Archive DVD), stick with it beyond the first five minutes—viewers must first endure a trio of warnings from the governors of Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina about the perils of the criminal life. Juvenile delinquency was an ongoing national concern in the postwar period, as distressing as polio, the bomb, and Biro and Wood’s Crime Does Not Pay. Parents, teachers, and church groups wrung their hands over how all this glorification of crime might lead to a generation of profligates, so the brothers Warner must have been eager to let three pontificating politicians blow for a minute or two at the start of the picture. This is by no means a juvenile delinquency movie—that filmic fad was still a few years away—but given the gunfire about to light up the screen, it’s hard to blame them for welcoming any stripe of official endorsement.

Wait. Biro and Wood,* you say? Who? They were the boys behind the most brutal comic book ever made. You thought those 1950s EC strips were bad? Get wise. Crime Does Not Pay plumbed the depths of human depravity and put it all on display on the glossy covers and pulpy pages of a sensation that was devoured by millions of kiddies and adults each month from the 1940s to the early 1950s. The comic dodged censors (at least for a while) because its crooked culprits always got it in the end, but in the pages leading up to those last few panels, Biro, Wood, and company exalted in an orgy of tommy guns, nooses, shotgun blasts, short skirts, and shallow graves. They spilled buckets of blood; they jammed hypodermic needles in their characters’ eyes; they set women on fire. As a matter of fact, in their June 1948 issue they even told the story of notorious Depression-era gangsters Walter Legenza* and Bobby Mais, the same fellows whose capers loosely inspired Highway 301. The movie creeps right up on that same thin razor of a line between documentary and exploitation that Crime Does Not Pay gleefully spat upon. With the exception of, perhaps, The Phenix City Story, it comes closer than any other midcentury crime film to capturing the wanton lewdness of those comics.

Highway 301 opens in tobacco country, with the Tri-State crew taking down a Winston-Salem bank in broad daylight. One by one, as the hoods exit the idling getaway car and take up positions in the lobby, a narrator gives up the skinny on their respective yellow sheets. One henchmen boasts 21 arrests and zero convictions—accused of everything from arson to murder. Another has just as many collars, with nothing to show for it beyond a hundred-dollar fine. George Legenza himself is on the lam, having busted his way out of the state penitentiary some months ago—though if he’s worried about being nabbed it doesn’t show. Highway 301’s moralizing tone is front and center from open to close: the system treats crooks with kid gloves, and the boys and girls in the audience need to be scared straight before the George Legenzas of the world get their hands on them.

The robbery comes off fine—turns out the gang has been tearing up and down Highway 301 for a while, leaving the bluecoats in the lurch. Even the feds are in on it now, but, as it happens in so many mid-century noirs, the law is obliged to impotently wait on the crooks to goof up. Fate and Destiny are the twin puppet masters of the noir universe, and they don’t give a damn about making the police look smart. When noir screenwriters wanted to lay crooks low, they zeroed their scripts in on tiny mistakes that turned out to have big consequences—a cosmic, ironic brand of justice. Take, for example, a canonical picture like Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing: karma comes not via the law, but rather from a discarded horseshoe in a parking lot, a cuckolded husband, and a gust of wind on an airport tarmac. In the noir universe, cops mostly chase their tails until the time comes for them to swoop in and pick up the pieces.

In Highway 301, fate comes with penciled eyebrows and a French accent. Lee Fontaine, (B-movie actress Gaby André), a recent conquest of Legenza’s protégé, is new to the gang. After she’s logged enough time to see what Legenza does to cops (shoots them in the back), armored car guards (shoots them in the back), and his girlfriends (shoots them in the back), she decides to beat it back to her native Canada. The film’s second and third acts take a detour from all that bank robbing and nestle into the shadowy confines of the Warner’s back lot, as the narrative shifts focus away from the gang’s crime spree to Legenza’s efforts to snatch Fontaine before she can blab. Don’t think too hard about why the Tri-State boys carpool to and fro with their girlfriends stashed at nearby motor courts instead of leaving them safe at home—the story falls apart if they don’t. But let’s at least acknowledge that in most other like-minded films (including Cochran and Cagney’s White Heat) the paramours don’t travel. I’ll back off that point as far as Hollywood lifer Virginia Grey is concerned. Her seen-it-all floozy steals every scene, and Highway 301 would be a lonely stretch of blacktop without her.

Yet the film’s tone is such that it barely resembles the iconic noirs from just a few years before. Double Indemnity, Laura, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Big Sleep, and many others class-up their violence under a veneer of lust and sex. That’s not the case here—Highway 301 is as brutal as it is detached. Its killings are more coldly matter-of-fact than any seen in the classics mentioned earlier, and more closely resemble those from another bank job picture, 1995’s Heat, release nearly a half-century later.

In the end, this is a low budget affair, but a stylish one. Yes, Richmond, Virginia has far too many palm trees and conspicuously resembles the Bunker Hill neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles, but the serpentine streets of the WB back lot never looked better, doused in shadow and drenched with rain. The film’s final moments, including a fantastic car stunt and a hair-raising sequence set atop a train trestle, are not only worth the price of admission, but also render bearable all of the dreary semi-documentary bits that showcase law enforcement. •

Legenza in Crime Does Not Pay

 * Writer-artist Bob Wood beat a woman to death in New York’s Irving Hotel—she was “giving me a bad time” he bragged to the cabbie who drove him home—and did three years for first-degree manslaughter. Seem like a short sentence? Apparently in those days being drunk was a mitigating factor. Rest easy though: Wood signed some IOUs with the made guys at Sing Sing in order to make his prison stretch go easy. When he got out and the time came to pay the piper, Wood couldn’t find his wallet. He was murdered within a year of his release.

* The real-life Legenza would die in Virginia’s electric chair on February 2, 1935. A wealth of documents are available here.

Highway 301

Written and Directed by Andrew Stone

Produced by Brian Foy

Starring Steve Cochran, Virginia Grey, Gaby André, and Robert Webber

Cinematography is by Carl Guthrie

Released by Warner Bros. Pictures

Running time: 83 minutes

WOMEN FROM HEADQUARTERS (1950)

“Around the clock you will rescue children from unfit homes, neglectful parents, and crime provoking surroundings. On patrol of public parks, playgrounds, and schoolyards, you will keep a vigilant watch over safety of children. Our files tell a meaningful story of lost and despairing wrecks of girls led out of the shadows of crime and from the brink of destruction and suicide by the friendly hands of policewomen.”

“And nothing will stand between you and the unforeseen danger of your every assignment except what you’ve learned here at the academy. There’s a snub-nosed police revolver in your shoulder bags or under arm holsters that’s for your protection in emergency. Keep that in mind: for emergency only. Congratulations and good luck to each one of you.”

Given that Women from Headquarters is a bottom of the bill crime programmer from Republic Pictures, shot in only twelve days, one’s expectations would surely be low. Not so fast though — with a director like George Blair and with John MacBurnie behind the camera, it’s safe to raise the bar a little. By 1950 these cats, along with other members of Republic’s crime quickie crew (producer Stephen Auer, editor Harold Minter, etc.) had established a track record of modest but surprisingly good stuff (Streets of San Francisco, Post Office Investigator, Alias the Champ, Federal Agent at Large, Unmasked, and Destination Big House). All that being said, it’s a shame that Women from Headquarters falls short of expectations in just about every way imaginable.

Joyce Harper (Virginia Huston) and Ruby Kane (Barbra Fuller) have been struggling by on their own for years — Joyce practically raised the younger girl. But when the war came Joyce joined the Army nurses’ corps, leaving teenage Ruby without the crutch of an older role model. Now back together in Los Angeles, the two women (Ruby’s just turned 21) are trying to make a go of it as roommates in the brave new post-war world. At first glance, Ruby appears to be making out better. She’s got a nice gig hopping cars at a drive-in off Sunset and a steady boyfriend — though Joyce hardly approves. For her part, Joyce is struggling. She’s been bouncing from secretarial job to secretarial job, unattached and unable to find fulfilling work that doesn’t involved getting pawed by her bosses. She says early on, “when I got out of uniform I came back to a world I didn’t fit into. I felt sort of lost and unhappy in the work I’d done before.”

Joyce finally discovers her purpose on the night Ruby gets busted. Her motherly suspicions of the younger girl’s beau Max were well founded. While out on a date at a local watering hole (Ruby likes to get loaded) Max slips into the back room to negotiate a drug deal with the proprietor, leaving Ruby alone with her drink. When a drunken barfly tries to get fresh, Ruby tosses her highball in his face at precisely the moment a girl-boy cop team braces the bar on a routine check. Surprisingly, it’s Ruby who gets popped — the lady cop, Sergeant Rogers (Frances Charles), is prowling for suspected jailbait. Rogers puts Ruby in the backseat and drives her home to Joyce, who verifies the girl’s age and gets her off the hook. In the course of their conversation, Rogers gives Joyce the low-down on the LAPD and tells her she thinks she’d be a great fit.

Rogers wasn’t kidding either. Joyce churns her way through the LAPD academy and upon graduation is assigned to a plainclothes unit working directly out of headquarters. In her first few months on the job she amasses a record that would make Edmund Exley piss his pants: busting up high class gambling dens, saving kidnapped children, and chasing down bank robbers. Joyce even brings in a cop killer. Unfortunately all we get to see of her exploits are a montage of newspaper headlines and B roll of crooks on the run.

While all of this is happening Ruby is suspiciously absent from the movie. Following her near miss with the cops, she and Max bolt the Southland for Chicago. We don’t see her again until much later, after Joyce gets promoted to the narcotics squad. The headline-grabbing lady cop learns that her old friend has returned to California when she discovers her in the infirmary at the city jail, pregnant and battered by Max, now a hardcore felon. Sharing her tale of woe with her old pal, the naïve Ruby delivers the movie’s campiest line: “I was married to a criminal dope peddler.” Joyce agrees to get Ruby out of the clink if she rolls over on Max, who is then expected to stooge on his supplier, and on and on up the chain until Joyce can hopefully expose “Mr. Big.” Max’s paternal instincts kick in when he learns that Ruby is knocked up, and he happily spills on his bosses, leaving Joyce and her blue crew to move in and clean out the garbage.

I don’t know about you, but the two quotes set off at the top of the essay are worth getting excited about. They suggest a movie about female police officers more concerned with rolling their sleeves up and doing good work than with keeping their makeup on straight. Too bad for us, secretary turned cop Virginia Huston never wears a uniform or pounds a beat in this movie, and her face — delightful as it is — is always perfectly, and frustratingly, composed. In fact, she somehow manages to get through the picture almost entirely without showing off any real police work, and the early promise of those “despairing wrecks of girls” are left to the speeches, while that snub-nosed police revolver stays forever hidden in her shoulder bag.

Women from Headquarters’s promise as a film noir is wrapped up in Joyce’s feelings of angst at her return from the war, and her unusual career response to those feelings. This inability of the returning veteran to reintegrate into domestic society is one of the cornerstones of noir; it’s only too bad that the film doesn’t do more with it, though surely we have to award Republic some points for the gender switch. While Joyce’s response to her newfound malaise is to defy societal expectations by pursuing a potentially deadly job in the police force, she outwardly displays none of the angst or inner turmoil that we hope for. Certainly we can’t blame the actress. For what its worth, this is the same Virginia Huston who played Robert Mitchum’s girlfriend Ann in that noiriest of noirs, Out of the Past. Huston’s filmography lists only 13 roles, but the majority were top shelf projects. We have to believe she could act a little.

Possibly the failure is the normally excellent Blair’s. He allows his cast to stumble through, and fails to manipulate his camera and the lighting with same verve that I’d come to expect from him. In the end, this is an instance when we have to accept the shortcomings of B material and make allowances. The story is too plot driven and the reels are simply too few to allow for an A picture exploration into Joyce’s psyche. Regardless, while Women from Headquarters’s failure to rate as a film noir is forgivable, its failure to entertain isn’t. The promise of the subject matter gives me shivers, the noir-style character tropes are evident, and the thing moves along quickly enough, but it’s a sloppily rendered paint by numbers picture that isn’t particularly worth looking at. If you want to see somewhat similar material handled the right way, check out 1953’s Code Two.

Women from Headquarters (1950)

Directed by George Blair

Written by Gene Lewis

Starring Virginia Huston, Robert Rockwell, and Barbra Fuller

Cinematography by John MacBurnie

Released by Republic Pictures

Running time 60 minutes

THE CASE AGAINST BROOKLYN (1958)

“Don’t you know what this is? This is a million bucks every week! They’ve got hundreds of runners, a whole city sewed up! Cops right up to the top, they can squash you like a bug…”

As America entered the Eisenhower era, Hollywood screenwriters began to challenge many of the taboos of the earlier postwar period. Beginning with the groundbreaking success of 1948’s The Naked City, the movie industry shifted production away from the back lots and sound stages, and more authentic-looking kind of crime film came into vogue. Yet as the 1940s became the 1950s, film producers began to understand that audiences were not only more sophisticated than they had been before the war, but far more jaded as well. The rote escapist fare that had been a godsend in the bleak years of the Depression and the war was less palatable than it had ever been. Atomic-age audiences instead wanted movies that reflected the cynicism and uncertainty of the world in which they lived — and while the resulting films eschewed a rose-colored artifice for something more realistic, the crowds could at least take reassurance in knowing they were all in it together.

There are numerous social, political, and cultural tremors that occurred after the end of the Second World War that nudged America closer and closer to the upheaval of the 1960s. In terms of popular culture alone, film noir is merely one of many such tremors. Let’s not forget about the rebelliousness of Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, James Dean, and the Beats; the explosion of Elvis Presley and Rock and Roll; the Kinsey report, Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, and Playboy magazine. Regardless, in the autumn of 1945, Americans were more united than they had ever been, sharing a common desire for a peaceful and prosperous future, bound up in high employment rates, low inflation, home ownership, and previously unheard of personal affluence. It practically goes without saying that by the 1960s this dream proved to be more or less unattainable (for many), unsustainable (for others), or simply unwanted—yet the twenty years in between proved to be a critical period of uneasy and confusing transition. One has only to watch a few episodes on television’s Mad Men to see the myriad ways in which prevailing attitudes were imploding in the face of clashing value systems: old-fashioned and conservative versus progressive and liberal—all set in the pressure-boiler of heretofore unseen gender and generational differences, compounded by an explosion in technology, information, and consumerism run wild. Truly the twenty years between the end of the Second World War and the beginning of Vietnam are some of the most fascinating in our history.

So what part did film noir play? While earlier films, even crime films, typically propped up the police force and civic leaders as pillars of the community, by the time the paranoid 1950s were in full swing such institutions became open to scrutiny — and the noir style was perfectly suited to confronting them on film. (With caution though: note the careful stance taken on the title lobby card shown at the end of the post.) The list of films that deal with corrupt officials is practically endless, though Hollywood’s Capra-esque populism always made it easier to pick on politicians rather than cops. Capra’s own 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington deals, as a plot point, with political corruption, while 1949’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture, All the King’s Men (1949) examines similar problems from a more exhaustive (and realistic) point of view. It took film noir, of which there are very few films that don’t involve the police, to expose crooked cops. The Big Heat (1953) is the most well-known such film, though The Turning Point (1952), Rogue Cop (1954) and Shield for Murder (1954) to some degree all tread similar ground. And while those films are concerned with bent police officials or individual officers, few ever dealt with the systematic corruption of a community’s entire police force. That brings us to 1958’s The Case Against Brooklyn.

Loosely based on a the story “I Broke the Brooklyn Graft Scandal” first chronicled in True magazine, the movie stars one of filmdom’s most beloved fathers, Darren McGavin, in a key developmental role. McGavin had splashed as a pusher in Otto Preminger’s 1955 picture The Man with the Golden Arm, and by 1958 he was a three-way veteran of stage, film, and television. The Case Against Brooklyn would prove to be McGavin’s springboard into a two-season TV run as the title character in Mike Hammer, where he cemented his reputation as an actor who could excel in tough-guy roles on both sides of the law. In The Case Against Brooklyn, McGavin plays Pete Harris, an idealistic young cop plucked straight out of the academy by the district attorney, a man intent on bringing down the numerous bookie joints wreaking havoc in the borough. Ironically (particularly considering Hollywood’s ongoing war against television), it’s a small-screen news exposé that sets the wheels of justice in motion. When the news piece points the finger at corrupt cops, the DA figures that the only way to get untouched officers is to pull them right out of the academy (a la DePalma’s The Untouchables). McGavin’s Pete Harris is no fresh-faced pup either (the actor was 36 when this was made), in spite of his inexperience as a police officer. His non-traditional age is explained away as the result of a ten-year stint in the Marine Corps.

A garage owner got in too deep and was beaten to death by the bookies — the DA’s only lead is the dead man’s wife (Maggie Hayes). Harris is told to get close to the widow, which he’s plenty eager to do. Other recruits pound the pavement, and some even enroll in college: “a hotbed of bookie activity.” Harris makes it clear early on that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to get next to the woman, even if it means shoving his own wife (Peggy McCay) onto the back burner. This notion of infidelity for the sake of professional advancement is one of the most curious in the film, and also one that only seems possible in the wake of the 1956 weakening of the Motion Picture Production Code. It strikes at the heart of placing materialism and personal prestige ahead of traditional values, while reinforcing the film noir trope of the police officer as a thoroughly alienated character unable to maintain a healthy personal relationship.

Most cinematic cops were still married in the fifties, though their unions were increasingly on the rocks. Howard Duff’s character in The Naked City is an idealistic young cop just like Pete Harris, but a decade later Harris’s wife is just so much extra baggage. Even when she is brutally murdered (in a sequence lifted directly from The Big Heat) his grief barely registers; by the final reel it’s clear that in spite of the idealized characterization of his wife, Harris will be just as content to end up with the widow. By the early 1970s screenwriters wouldn’t even bother with marriage — cops wore their divorces as prominently as their badges. This failure at personal life has become an enduring factor in establishing the modern movie policemen, one of cinema’s most well worn clichés. The idea would further evolve in the 1980s, when the cop’s absent wife was just as likely to have been killed as a sympathy ploy (Lethal Weapon) or in order to motivate revenge (Hard to Kill). Al Pacino’s character in Heat (1995) has multiple exes, yet the film exhaustively details the collapse of his current marriage. In Die Hard (1988), which harkens back to the heroic bravado of John Wayne films, Bruce Willis is estranged from his wife, and he’s only able to win her back when his reckless determinism actually saves her life — to turn her back on him then would demonstrate more ingratitude than audiences could tolerate.

 

As illogical as it might sound, Pete Harris’s relationship with the widow actually does lead him to the heart of the Brooklyn bookie rackets. We are deep into B-movie concessions here: Harris goes undercover, and the DA brass don’t even give him a new name — it would have ruined a plot point. It turns out that Rudi (Warren Stevens), one of the racket toughs who laid the beat down on the widow’s dead husband, is also trying to hone in on Harris’s play with the woman. Contrivance and coincidence work their magic and by the end of the movie we get the expected showdown between the forces of good and evil, complete with a hospital bed finale and newfound romance.  Along the way, McGavin’s athleticism and imposing physical presence are on display as Harris relentlessly plugs away at his job, breaking anything that gets in his way. (After seeing this, his casting as Hammer is a no-brainer.) When he’s finally brought to bear by the bureaucracy of the police force, Harris turns over his badge and his gun (The Big Heat, again) and squares the job on his own terms — again establishing precedents for the cop dramas of the 1970s and 1980s.

Despite its rather late-cycle release, The Case Against Brooklyn is solidly a film noir. It makes a half-ass stab at voice-over narration, and the music is melodramatic and intrusive at times, but the cinematography is impressive. Many of the interiors are shot in the blandly-lit middle-distance takes popularized by television, but the exteriors are often fantastic: one scene in particular finds Harris in a low-light, low-angle face off with the dirty cop who has just murdered his partner. The framing, high-contrast, and blocking are as good an anything you’ll ever find in a quintessential film noir. However, it’s by other means that The Case Against Brooklyn’s truly establishes itself as a film noir. Even the title is significant in its ambiguity: it indicts not only the civic bureaucracy of the borough, but seemingly its people as well — after all, the bookie joints couldn’t fly without their clientele —suggesting that in the noir milieu, everyone has a little dirt on their hands. It would have been easy enough to call this Cops for Sale, or something along those lines, so the vagueness of the title seems purposeful. Yet it’s the characters that really drive the point home: Pete Harris is in the classic mold of the noir protagonist: alienated, obsessive, driven to the point of recklessness. The movie gives us the two classic female types: the fatale and the perfect wife. And although the script requires its fatale, Maggie Hayes, to transform from one type to the other along the way, her initial impression is entirely contrived to sexualize her character and motivate audiences to imagine her as something dangerous. It’s her presence in the picture that creates tension between Harris and his wife, causing us to question his motivations: is he relentlessly pursuing the bad guys, or is it just the girl? In the gray half-light of the noir world, the answer is both.

The Case Against Brooklyn (1958)

Directed by Paul Wendkos (The Burglar)

Screenplay by Bernard Gordon (Blacklisted, credited as Raymond T. Marcus) and Julien Zimet

Screen Story by Danial B. Ullman. Based on an account by Ed Reid

Produced by Charles H. Schneer

Cinematography by Fred Jackman, Jr. (The Night Holds Terror, Cell 2455 Death Row)

Art Direction by Ross Bellah (The Lineup, Nightfall)

Starring Darren McGavin, Warren Stevens, Maggie Hayes, and Peggy McCay

Released by Columbia Pictures

Running time: 82 minutes

8.0.3

BUNCO SQUAD (1950)

Bunco, n.: The use of dishonest methods to acquire something of value; a swindle.

They oughtta teach Bunco Squad in film school, it’s that good. A 1950 product of the famed RKO B unit, it’s a first-rate example of narrative economy and efficient picture-making. Now I’m no knucklehead, Bunco Squad isn’t The Narrow Margin. I’m not out to compare those two pictures, because beyond their B status and shared studio they have little in common. The Narrow Margin is an exemplary noir thriller with an iconic tough-guy actor in his greatest part. Bunco Squad doesn’t rate as a film noir and has a far less prestigious or able cast than Margin — the actors in Bunco Squad even mispronounce words, tough ones like occult and Los Angeles. Still, this is a little movie that crackles. It’s contrived, heavy on coincidence, and might even be a bit campy, but in spite of all this it still begs to be watched and doesn’t disappoint those who do. It’s a gem of a mid-century crime picture, and although it’s not a film noir, it’s one that certainly rates a few days in the spotlight on this blog.

I included the definition above because “bunco” is hardly a household word. It never registered with me until I read James Ellroy—even though Jack Webb devoted a section of his cop manifesto The Badge to the LAPD bunco squad way back in 1958. That same unit is the subject of our movie, which beyond a rare television airing was nigh on impossible to see until it recently became available through the Warner Archive. The picture opens fast, at only 67 minutes it has to, with star Robert Sterling lecturing a citizens’ group about all the ways that flimflam crews get over on the squares. He’s even got a home-movie screen with 8mm visual aids. Movies such as Southside 1-1000, Code Two, Appointment with Danger and The Street with No Name (to name a very few) sport openings with a narrator speaking over some montage of stock footage, telling us about how the treasury boys, the motorbike unit, the postal cops, or even the g-men are putting their asses on the line for the sake of law, order, and Wonder Bread.

Bunco Squad does the same thing: we get the footage, we get the narrator, we get the same results. But in this case the speaker happens to be our star, and by introducing him in this way it trims some fat from the running time. And by making the montage sequence a movie-within-the-movie, it allows us to watch how the on-screen audience reacts. When Sterling’s Detective Steve Johnson mentions how the palm readers and tarot card shams contribute to the $200 million per year bunco haul, a old man in the crowd looks down his nose at his wife, who turns away, red in the face. Yet when Johnson adds the wheel of fortune and roulette to the list, it’s the wife who gets to glower. As Johnson wraps up his speech his partner rushes in—the captain needs them downtown—a hot tip on a new racket. The scene runs just over two minutes, but it’s one of the many frugal but effective moments that sets Bunco Squad apart. It packs a wallop of important information: we meet our star and his partner; get a fix on the bad guys, what they do, how they do it, and who they do it to.

The cops here are one-dimensional, pure cardboard; their moral certainty is absolute. At 67 minutes, time can’t be wasted agonizing over ethical ambiguities or on character development — in fact there’s no character development at all, which is the most damning evidence against Bunco Squad as a film noir; it has none of the alienation, obsession, and desperate choices that make a noir a noir. We have to take for granted why the police are compelled to uphold order and why the crooks would choose to do ill. Fate never takes a hand and irony must have been busy elsewhere. These points aren’t offered to disparage Bunco Squad, but to differentiate it from the film noir and show that such a picture can nevertheless succeed by other means. What Bunco Squad does well is show us, exposé style, how the con artists organize and carry out their scams. The notion makes sense: audiences generally have a sense of how cops do business, but in a movie that deals with crooks who use brains instead of bullets, there’s big upside in showing how they pull the rabbit out of the hat — particularly when it’s a spooky séance scam.

Here are the details: con man Tony Weldon (Ricardo Cortez, Bunco’s lone name star) rolls into L.A. on the heels of Mrs. Royce’s secretary, knowing that if he can get close enough to the old bird he might pry loose her 2.5 million dollar nest egg. When Weldon learns that Mrs. Royce’s boy was killed at Normandy he knows exactly how to work her. He builds a crew of professional swindlers, including ex-con crystal ball gazer Princess Liane (Bernadene Hayes, not bad in a role tailor-made for Marie Windsor), professional shill Mrs. Cobb (Vivien Oakland), restaurant swami Drake (Bob Bice), and the smooth-talking Fred Reed (John Kellogg). They develop an elaborate shell game in order to convince Mrs. Royce to bequeath her money to the “Rama Society.” There’s a fine sequence that depicts each of them uncovering seemingly banal pieces of information about the dead son’s schoolboy days, that when sewn together and dressed up in an otherworldly séance, take on the look and feel true mysticism. The plan works, and Mrs. Royce amends her will. When the secretary gets suspicious of Weldon her car plummets into a canyon—no brakes! (Weldon cuts so many brake lines in the movie that if were a mob picture they’d call him “Snips.”)

Meanwhile, the cops are pounding the pavement trying to make a case—they know who’s involved, but can’t prove a crime has been committed. In a spectacular B-movie coincidence, Steve shows up at Rama society headquarters just in time to see Mrs. Royce. When the cops brace her she scoffs and tells them to buzz off—which Detective Johnson does, and how: straight over a cliff with cut brake lines! He lives, barely, and enjoys one moviedom’s briefest convalescent periods. Finally, the cops contrive to beat Weldon at his own game, with the assistance of famous magician Dante (playing himself) and Johnson’s actress girlfriend, posing as a rival medium. When their scheme gains traction with Mrs. Royce, Weldon resorts to violence, setting the stage for Bunco’s finale—and another brakeless car careening through the hills above Malibu.

The fixation on murder by cutting brake lines jeopardizes the movie’s credibility, but it’s also another one of those expeditious touches that allow a whole lot of story to be crammed into a few reels. The first time it happens we get plenty of detailed information: the killer approaches and climbs under the car; we hear him cut the lines; we see him resurface and stow the cutters. This takes a modest thirty seconds; the final time it takes just six. The cinematic value of this method of attempted murder is significant. Bullets are difficult to dodge, but the brake line technique generates suspense—and a special sort of suspense at that, considering that the amount of time between the cutting of the lines and the car ride itself can be shortened or lengthened to suit the plot. 

Most B pictures rely on contrivances stacked on top of one another and outrageous coincidences too. Bunco Squad is no different, yet it’s all done so smoothly you’ll hardly notice and surely won’t care. It borrows one of the quintessential devices of the caper picture to great effect: that of the criminal who builds a crew and executes a clever plan; except in this case it’s not a heist but a swindle the crooks have in mind. There’s nothing spectacular about the story or the cast, and its noir credentials are tepid. But Bunco Squad is a crackerjack crime movie anyway. It’s polished, well constructed, features a ton of on-location L.A. exteriors and surprising special effects. It goes a long way towards reminding us that not all mid-century crimes movies were filmed in the noir style, and that such films shouldn’t be dismissed—or forgotten.

Bunco Squad (1950)
Directed by Herbert Leeds
Produced by Louis Rachmil
Cinematography by Henry Freulich
Screenplay by George Callahan, based on a novel by Reginald Taviner
Starring Robert Sterling, Joan Dixon, and Ricardo Cortez
Released by RKO Studios
Running time: 67 minutes