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A lecture to government agents, that's the "semi-documentary" angle, a composite account ("the biggest tax-evasion case since Al Capone") to show the machinery at work. Counterfeiters are slippery beings, the dragnet sprawls from Washington to Detroit to Los Angeles, it's like "punching a feather bed" until the intrepid Treasury Department duo (Dennis O'Keefe, Alfred Ryder) dive undercover. Nabokov's "The Leonardo" figures in the set-up, "good paper and good plates" decorate the vertical structure all the way to the comely "lion tamer" (Jane Randolph) near the top. Anthony Mann's technique is Huston's but sharpened into the hardest noir edge: From the opening view of an informer's slaying on the waterfront, lighting is a stark compositional tool. (John Alton's deep-focus transforms a cramped flat into multiple planes in one humorously virtuosic moment, with a bed's frame foregrounding grid patterns, a lamp illuminating the middle section, and a door opening to reveal another character shaving in the distant background.) Forged identities for forged currency (cf. Friedkin's To Live and Die in L.A.), the mirror that reflects twin organization at opposite sides of the law. Faces in close-up devoured by shadows: The veteran schemer's supplicating mug as he roasts inside a sauna, O'Keefe's features shrinking under his fedora's brim after helplessly watching his partner's execution. Embodying the lie is the agent's ultimate achievement and burden, a netherworld of surveillance and infiltration that can be brought down by an abrupt smile of recognition. Mann would pursue the theme across eras (Reign of Terror) and territories (Border Incident) until the wintry abstraction of A Dandy in Aspic. With Mary Meade, Wallace Ford, Charles McGraw, and June Lockhart. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |