The Street with No Name (William Keighley, 1948) Another of the odd docu-dramas Filmed in the real locations (but not better actors) that studio 20th Century Fox made in the 1940's with the FBI's full co-operation. As with the earlier example, The House on 92nd Street, Lloyd Nolan once again plays FBI inspector George Briggs who hires a new agent recruit to infiltrate a violent gangster racket run by one Alec Stiles (Richard Widmark, a year after tearing up the screen in Kiss of Death). Mark Stevens plays the mole, George Cordell, while a young John McIntire (wait a minute, he looks old in this one, too!) is his chief contact with the Feds. The Stiles gang is high on fashion, but low on smarts with the exception of Stiles, who's big on intricately worked out by-the-book schemes, secret rooms inside warehouses and likes to do a lot of whining about his gang, his moll, and probably the government, too, if he actually paid taxes. He takes a personal interest in Cordell (working under the alias of George Manley) and personally hires him as part of his mob.
The movie builds to a violent climax with anybody-who's-anybody in the cast all in the same place dodging bullets and daggers and hiding in all the spacious blackness that director Keighley and cinematographer Joe MacDonald (he shot My Darling Clementine, Call Northside 777, and Pickup on South Street) can offer. It's a minor noir, curious only for Widmark's early work and the spare elements of the truthiness at FBI Headquarters, which are less on display than The House on 92nd Street. This would be the last film of its type to have the full co-operation of the FBI until James Stewart starred in The FBI Story in 1959, and, of course the TV series "The F.B.I." starring Efrem Zimbalist, Jnr.
Well...almost. The script for The Street with No Name ended up being recycled for another, better film for Fox, which we'll talk about next week.
Thieves' Highway (Jules Dassin
, 1949) A revenge story set in the wild and wooly world of wildcat truckers (also explored in A.I. Bezzerides' similarly themed They Drive By Night). Nick Garcos (Richard Conte) comes home after a big score and showers his family with presents. He's so full of himself that he doesn't notice the obvious: Dad's missing his legs (which makes the slippers he bought him a very poor choice). It seems while Nick was away, Dad got rooked on a vegetable run, taken for a long drunk, and had a bad crash in his dilapidated truck, crippling him.
Worldly-wise and hardened in combat, Nick decides on an assault on the man who crushed his dad's dreams, one Mike Figlia (Lee J. Cobb), a bad apple who'll spoil the whole bunch right down to the bottom of the barrell. He partners with the wild-catter who bought Pop's truck (the great Millard Mitchell) to deliver two loads of golden delicious to Figlia's produce wholesaler in San Fran'...if they can get through a gauntlet that includes duplicitous rival wild-catters, a truck with a bad universal (and not much good!), 36 hours straight on the road without any sleep, and worn tires (a sequence that Dassin turns into a thrilling montage of overlapping images).
Except for the loading of apples, all this takes place at night, and no one could dredge the dark as well as Jules Dassin (as he was always proud to announce, that's pronounced "Da-ssin," from the U.S.). Dassin always had a flair for the street and the twisted culture of film noir, and Thieves Highway is gritty and street-smart: no one in this movie is naive or innocent, everybody has an agenda or an angle, and Nick has to keep his head on straight (tough to do with a neck injury received when a truck collapsed on him while changing a tire), whether negotiating with Figlia or dealing with the street-frail (Valentina Cortese) hired by Figlia to entertain Nick while he works the angles.
It's an education, one that toughens Nick up and makes him see that there's more than what he imagined in his existence before. Sure, he's earned a living and survived the war, but... It's one thing to avoid death, it's quite another to embrace life.
The Street with No Name (William Keighley, 1948) Another of the odd docu-dramas Filmed in the real locations (but not better actors) that studio 20th Century Fox made in the 1940's with the FBI's full co-operation. As with the earlier example, The House on 92nd Street, Lloyd Nolan once again plays FBI inspector George Briggs who hires a new agent recruit to infiltrate a violent gangster racket run by one Alec Stiles (Richard Widmark, a year after tearing up the screen in Kiss of Death). Mark Stevens plays the mole, George Cordell, while a young John McIntire (wait a minute, he looks old in this one, too!) is his chief contact with the Feds. The Stiles gang is high on fashion, but low on smarts with the exception of Stiles, who's big on intricately worked out by-the-book schemes, secret rooms inside warehouses and likes to do a lot of whining about his gang, his moll, and probably the government, too, if he actually paid taxes. He takes a personal interest in Cordell (working under the alias of George Manley) and personally hires him as part of his mob.
