MIAMI EXPOSÉ (1956)

Sun drenched.


By the mid 50s it seems that film noir had moved south in search of better weather. Despite the vacation locale, had Miami Exposé been shot just five years earlier, the result would have appeared darker, drearier, and smelled a little less like coconut oil. Times change and film styles change with them, so in lieu of the Kefauver senate investigation into organized crime and its growing hold on major American cities, as well as Hollywood’s new propensity to make the government happy, the subject matter of films that had previously been steeped in the noir tradition became brighter and more oriented to rooting out corruption on a large scale, as opposed to films that had theretofore more concerned with the struggles of the lone individual against an oppressive and fatalistic system.


If there was a strong holdover as film noir evolved into.......something else, it was the cynicism — at least as far as cops are concerned. In the 1940s film noir transposed the cynical detective of the pulp novel to the big screen, where he prospered, and has more or less been going strong ever since. In the late 50s noir went into hibernation for a decade and a half, more or less, and reemerged with new vitality in characters such as Popeye Doyle and Eddie Coyle. Though I tend to think of him as a poor man’s Robert Mitchum (with not an iota of disrespect to either man intended), Lee J. Cobb was perfectly suited for cop roles in the 50s. Tough, cynical, perpetually tired, yet still likable, (remember that Arthur Miller wrote Willie Loman for him) Cobb injected gravity into every part he played. His personal life caught up with his screen persona at the time — he was called to testify before HUAC in 1953, and like so many others he named names in order to save his career, though the scars of having done so were permanent. Just a few months prior to making Miami Exposé, Cobb had to be removed from the production of William Castle’s The Houston Story, when he was too exhausted to finish his scenes and had to be rushed to the hospital with symptoms of a heart attack. It would actually be a heart attack that killed Cobb in 1976 at the relatively young age of 64. He does for Miami Exposé what Dan Duryea does for World for Ransom — without him, it just wouldn’t be worth the time.


The big problem with Miami Exposé is that it shoots off like a rocket, fizzles, and plummets back to earth. The film is introduced by, of all people, the mayor of Miami, Randy Christmas. He speaks to the audience from behind his desk (adorned with brass placard reading “Mayor Christmas”), with an air that I’m certain he hoped was presidential, or at least gubernatorial, about the creeping terror of organized crime, no longer confined to just New York and Chicago. The film then cuts to aerial footage of Florida cities, while a narrator describes the current economic climate and population boom in the Sunshine State. He speaks directly to the viewer, and rattles off statistics about interstate highways and vacation dollars as the scene vacillates between sandy beaches, pleasure boats, and the recurring shot of a commuter plane winging its way to South Beach. His closing remarks are a harsh reprimand: “Yes, you should have thought about these statistics, they might have saved your life!” As the passenger plane suddenly explodes into a million pieces, leaving viewers quite startled just as the titles finally appear on the screen. An auspicious start full of sensationalism that the film fails to maintain longer than the opening titles.


We learn later that the plane was blown up by the mob, at the cost of all 41 passengers and crew, in order to eliminate a single man who stood in the way of a plan to legalize gambling in the state. This sort of overkill, especially the kind that involved the murder of civilians, was a popular story device in films such as this one. Whether an airline crash, an apartment fire, gas explosion, or smallpox outbreak, filmmakers were always certain to show that the actions of the racketeers were deadly where the general population was concerned. The strangest aspect of the film is the casting choice of Alan Napier for the leader of the mob. He’s the man behind the plan to manipulate the ballot provision that would legalize gambling, and then gain control of those rackets, making Miami the Las Vegas of the east, and him the boss. Most people will remember Napier as Bruce Wayne’s butler Alfred from the campy Batman television series, but that aside, it strains credibility to think that the head of the criminal organization in the film, of which all the hoods are typical filmdom Mafioso, is a genteel bespectacled Englishman. The excuse given is that he learned that rackets through decades as a scum bag defense attorney, but it just doesn’t play given all we know about how the real Sicilian mobs actually operated.


Cobb’s part of story is more laden with cop clichés than Swiss cheese is with holes: He’s set to retire from the force, but his partner is killed, which sucks him in deeper than ever before. It turns out someone saw the killing, and it’s a she. She’s the ex-showgirl moll of a gangster, and she’s scared to death that her name is now on the hit list. Cobb has to protect her, but the two can’t seem to get along. He hides her in a shack in the Everglades, but the pinstripe suits find out where and swoop in via a commandeered fan-boat. Cobb shows up in the nick of time, Tommy gun blasting, and saves the day. All of the derivative pieces of the story would add up to something unwatchable were it not for the surprisingly good technical filmmaking. The film positively glitters with daylight — and on location shooting in Miami, even a few scenes in Havana, provides an interesting respite from Hollywood back lots and dreary Manhattan streets. Car lovers will find much to enjoy here — there aren’t really any chases in the film, though there are unlimited shots of Cobb and other characters driving from place to place in shiny Buick and Cadillac convertibles.


Patricia Medina, who was married to Joseph Cotten for more than thirty years, plays the girl. It’s surprising to learn she was British, considering she did American so well in this film. Medina is a real bright spot, it’s a shame she wasn’t better known, though she did have a long and active career in Hollywood. In looks and style she evokes Jane Russell. Also notable is the presence of Edward Arnold in his final film appearance. As others have noted, it’s unfortunate that this film was his last, as his part isn’t a good one — he’s a political stooge and a sap — and he looks totally spent in the film. A job’s a job, but it’s only out of respect for his great career that the word pathetic isn’t used. Score one for Eddie though, in spite of his sad part in the film, he obviously still had the star power to rate the lion’s share of the movie poster — his huge face leers down at Medina’s swimsuited cleavage.


Miami Exposé is a cookie cutter film from a cookie cutter period in filmmaking. However it does provide a glimpse into the heavy handed way Hollywood responded the political happenings of the Eisenhower era, and the painful diminishment of the film noir style.

TCM Clip One

TCM Clip Two

TCM Clip Three

Miami Exposé (1956)

Director: Fred F. Sears
Cinematographer: Ben Kline
Screenplay: Robert E. Kent
Starring: Lee J. Cobb, Patricia Medina, Edward Arnold, and Alan Napier.
Released by: Columbia Pictures
Running time: 73 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