10.20.2007

Blonde Ice




Michael Whalen and Leslie Brooks (doing that crazy eyes thing) in Blonde Ice (dir. Jack Bernhard, 1948).



Leslie Brooks and David Leonard.



Emory Parnell.

Jack Bernhard, the man who brought you Decoy, the story of a beautiful but cold-blooded she-devil who bumps off three men, brings you Blonde Ice, the story of a beautiful but cold-blooded she-devil who bumps off three men. Think this guy had issues with women? Or maybe just trouble thinking up new story ideas? Actually, legend has it that Edgar Ulmer played some part in writing this one, though there's nothing in the records to substantiate it. Blonde Ice doesn't fly off the rails with quite as much homicidal abandon as Decoy, but it's still a pretty wild ride. Check out this dialogue:

Robert Paige to Leslie Brooks: "You're not a normal woman. You're not warm. You're cold, like ice. Yeah, ice--blonde ice!"

Paige to Brooks again: "'Claire Cummings Hanneman Mason' ... if this keeps up you won't be able to get your initials on your silverware!"

Brooks to David Leonard (playing a psychoanalyst): "You and your slimy scientific snooping!"

Some of it is totally bargain basement. At one point, Brooks actually delivers the line (for no apparent reason), "They say the female of the species is deadlier than the male." But she does frosty quite well. In fact, just about nobody in the cast phones it in; everyone is pretty memorable, even the basically exchangeable husbands and jilted lovers. Especially cool is Emory Parnell as a smirking police captain: an inspiration, I'm conjecturing, for the character played by M. Emmet Walsh in the Coen Brothers' Blood Simple.

10.19.2007

Gone Baby Gone




Casey Affleck in Gone Baby Gone (dir. Ben Affleck, 2007).

It's so surprising that Ben Affleck is as good a director and writer as he turns out to be on Gone Baby Gone that one wants to overlook the film's flaws. But they're there, and they're fairly serious. I haven't read Dennis Lehane's novel, so I don't know if this defect originates with it, but that's neither here nor there. The fact is that what starts as an engrossing mystery suffers at midpoint from clumsy plot development and never recovers. Halfway through, the missing-child story seems to be resolved, but of course very soon something is revealed that suggests there is more to the picture. The problem: the way in which this something is revealed is that the main character (Patrick Kenzie, played by Casey Affleck) simply announces it. We do see the moment in which the clue is dropped, just as he does, but there is nothing dramatic about the transition from clue to revelation. It's just, one scene: clue is dropped; next scene: Kenzie says, hey, that was a clue. And sure enough, it was, and from then on, it's just a bunch of flashbacks and confessions. There is another twist that is supposed to catch us by surprise, but by then all the tension has dissipated and it just feels like you should have seen it coming. Which maybe you did.

There's also a subplot that plays out midway through, about another missing child, a subplot whose function is much too transparently to present Kenzie with a psychic and ethical burden he must measure against the burdens borne by others. Again, I wonder how much of this is Lehane's fault: Mystic River too (the movie at least--I didn't read that one either) was similarly laden with forced primal-sin Catholic psychodrama. It reveals my bias as a viewer, of course, that my ideal is the lean, well-oiled crime narrative rather than the symbolic urban tragedy.

It's still worth seeing, largely for Casey Affleck. When he's making the rounds in his scuzzy Boston neighborhood, interviewing the locals and looking for leads, the movie comes alive. Affleck's Kenzie looks and sounds like a teenager, and it's a neat hook. You feel his vulnerability, and when he responds to provocation as a tough guy, it feels like a bluff--which it must be in part, which makes his courage seem all the more impressive, as even he doesn't seem convinced it will work. Despite his movie-star good looks, he's very believable as the city kid who grew up with all the dealers and gangbangers, and who can still pull off being one of them even as he is separated from them by his alignment with law enforcement.

The other outstanding performance comes from Amy Ryan as the coke-whore mother of the missing girl. She makes what could have been a standard "white trash" stereotype into a fully-formed character. She's so out of it that she forgets herself in the middle of the crisis and makes gay jokes. In fact, she seems to spend more time smiling than not--it's like she knows something about life's sick joke and has just decided to roll with it, a kind of strength.

10.18.2007

You Only Live Once




Sylvia Sidney and Henry Fonda in You Only Live Once (dir. Fritz Lang, 1937).

Compared to a lot of other Fritz Lang films, this is a little pedestrian at times, but it's definitely got that nice "everything is hopeless and everyone is doomed" vibe one expects from him. Sylvia Sidney is such a chirpy little beam of sunshine that it's truly painful to watch her get sucked inexorably into Henry Fonda's vortex of shit luck.

10.16.2007

Rififi



Carl Möhner as Jo le Suedois and Jean Servais as Tony le Stéphanois in Rififi [Du rififi chez les hommes] (dir. Jules Dassin, 1955).



Dominique Maurin as Tonio le Suedois and Jean Servais as Tony le Stéphanois.



Perlo Vita (Jules Dassin) as Cesar le Milanais.



Magali Noël as Viviane.

Jules Dassin, in exile from Hollywood during the McCarthy years, made Rififi in France on a shoestring budget. He couldn't understand the dense argot of Auguste Le Breton's novel, so he had to have someone read it to him in order to adapt it for the screen. Le Breton was so upset at how much his book had been changed (for one thing, the necrophilia had been removed) that he pulled a gun on Dassin during their first meeting. They nevertheless became good friends.

I haven't read the book, but it's difficult to imagine that it could be any more of a masterpiece than the film. Its bleakness is a different kind from that of American noir, playing out as it does against an almost light-hearted background of camaraderie and daily life. Perhaps the major difference is in the portrayal of sexuality, which is not just franker, but less contaminated with gynephobic dread, more related to actual pleasure. And yet Dassin's American background distinguishes it from most French films in the genre as well: he's more in touch with the gestural and rhythmic specificity of US crime tropes, and he manages to transmit this sensibility to his actors. Dassin himself, under the pseudonym Perlo Vita, plays the suave safecracker Cesar le Milanais. It's a beautifully understated performance that is about as humbly enacted as you can imagine a semi-central role played by the director being. The anti-Orson-Welles.

10.15.2007

Michael Clayton




Tilda Swinton in Michael Clayton (dir. Tony Gilroy, 2007).

Sydney Pollack acts in and is one of the producers of Michael Clayton, and director Tony Gilroy has essentially made a Sydney Pollack film: the best one, in fact, since at least The Firm. Better than The Interpreter, and definitely better than the execrable Random Hearts. I'll admit to a high tolerance for Pollack's particular flavor of bland, which I often find soothing in the way TV shows about lawyers are soothing. And in the seventies, at least, he was making genuinely distinguished dramas and comedies for adults. Michael Clayton has some of that quality, and if it's finally not as satisfying as a Three Days of the Condor or an Absence of Malice, it's probably only because the filmic rhetoric of those pictures has run its historical course, and certainly cannot survive beneath the icy technical surface of today's standard thriller template: hi-res crispnesses of color and agitated motion that can only resonate in a post-digital consciousness. When Clayton (George Clooney) walks out on a hill to connect with some horses, it feels like it might be an allusion to The Asphalt Jungle; any similarity, however, dissolves in a blast of Dolby sound and CGI-enhanced flame. More generally, like every other dramatic feature being made these days in Hollywood, the whole thing just looks too much like a BMW ad.

On the level of "message" as well, the movie can't quite sustain the weight it imposes on itself. It's not just that Clayton's ethical transformation is too clean and sudden, but that it can't really be the point. What's interesting about his character is the way he tries to solve the specific problems he is paid to solve. Once he rejects the grounds for his engagement with those problems, he deserts his own story and becomes another, much more comfortable and less interesting figure. If Gilroy had followed through on the logic of who Clayton appears to be at the start of the film, the long close-up shot at the end would be a lot more meaningful. It might have more in common, for example, with the scene it superficially resembles: the end of The Long Good Friday. In that scene, Bob Hoskins' face is a window into the most excruciating weighing of every past action in his life and every consequence yet to come. George Clooney's face is only a window into a set of consequences that have effectively already played out, and that cannot possibly be of any further interest to the audience.

Another way of looking at the problem with Clayton as the main character: that character really ought to be Karen Crowder (Tilda Swinton). She's ambitious, vulnerable, desperate, cunning, panicked, utterly corrupt: noir on a stick. If we got to concentrate on her for the duration of the narrative, it would be properly excruciating. Clayton, in a less central capacity, could be a good foil to her. But apparently the filmmakers decided that a predictable, "sensitive" character study of a rotten corporate tool who finally sees the light would be more saleable than a harrowing, focused anatomy of irredeemable moral error.

See also Jodi Dean at I Cite, and Kim Dot Dammit.

10.14.2007

Decoy




Edward Norris, Jean Gillie, and Herbert Rudley in Decoy (dir. Jack Bernhard, 1946).



Director's credit w/grimy sink.



Robert Armstrong (check out the "filler" headline below his picture, and for that matter, all the text in small print that has nothing to do with anything: obviously midcentury filmmakers never anticipated viewers with the ability to freeze the frame).

Director Jack Bernhard made a small handful of films for Monogram (one of the "Poverty Row" B-studios) in the late forties, and then as far as I can tell, nothing is known about him. He married Jean Gillie, the star of Decoy, shortly before filming, and they were divorced soon after. About three years later, she died of pneumonia. This pall of foreshortened potential that hangs over Decoy doubtless has added to the air of mystique and cult status it has generated in recent years. Not that it's not, on its own merits, a true hard-boiled classic: despite some embarrassing production values and overplayed moments, it's right up there with Edgar Ulmer's Detour as one of the strangest and darkest noirs ever made.

Jean Gillie's Margot Shelby is, as has often been noted, about as fatale as a femme can get. She toys with her male suckers like a cat with a finch, and just as bloodily. There are two scenes in particular that epitomize her inhuman audacity: one in which she runs over a guy in a car (supposedly, in a since-edited version, she backs up and does it a second time), and another in which she simply laughs in a guy's face. What's so bad about laughing in a guy's face? You just have to watch it.

As I mentioned in my last post, this is part of a twofer DVD with Crime Wave. In retrospect, I probably should have watched Decoy first, because after Crime Wave's richly realized mise en scene and flawless ensemble of players, Decoy felt a bit one-dimensional. In any other context, however, I'm sure I would have come away raving just as strongly as I did about Crime Wave. Fortunately, they are on the same disc, so you can check them both out yourself.

See another viewer's report (with spoilers), and a clip of the first five minutes, at Noir of the Week.

10.13.2007

Crime Wave




Let it ring: the hands of Phyllis Kirk and Gene Nelson in Crime Wave (dir. André De Toth, 1954).



Jim Hayward, the maniacal Timothy Carey, and Charles Buzinsky (Charles Bronson).



Sterling Hayden.

It may be all you need to know about Crime Wave that noirologist and (apparently) full-time DVD commentator Eddie Muller is joined in the commentary track by James Ellroy, and that Ellroy just about has kittens. Yes, it does hurt his credibility a bit that he's such a complete spaz (he pants excitedly when he sees locations he likes, and growls so loudly at the mere mention of attractive actresses that he hurts Muller's ears). The same might be said for his off-the-cuff declaration mid-viewing that De Toth's film is not only better than Kubrick's The Killing (which was inspired in part by it), but better than Chinatown. It might be said, except that part of me agrees with him. Yes, it's the impetuous part. I would give anything to have been at the dinner Ellroy promised to buy Muller after the commentary, at which, he said, he would defend his provocative claim at length.

All right, it's just a low-budget heist flick shot in thirteen days. But everything in it clicks. Sterling Hayden as toothpick-chewing monster cop Det. Lt. Sims (Ellroy takes one look at him and says, "Fuck Russell Crowe in LA Confidential; that's Bud White!"). Phyllis Kirk, who plays the devoted wife of ex-con Gene Nelson as though she were a three-dimensional character, despite all attempts by the script to sabotage her. Gene Nelson's souped-up Deuce Coup. Ted de Corsia (the rabbit-punching Willie the Harmonica from Naked City) as a bullying gangleader (though his bullying comes in second to Hayden's). The young Charles Bronson, going by Charles Buzinsky, as a scary punk. And the even scarier Timothy Carey (who, along with Hayden and de Corsia, was drafted by Kubrick for the aforementioned The Killing).

Then there's the location shooting in Los Angeles and environs. The opening sequence of the gas station hold-up alone is a work of art. (During the titles, you see the gangsters' car pull up to the station window as the attendant raises his head to greet them--then, after the director's credit, the last ten or so seconds of film runs all over again, the attendant raising his head for a second time! And immediately following this, there is a severe change of camera angle that almost gives the effect of a jump cut. I don't know if this was an intentional stab at artsiness by De Toth and/or veteran John Ford cameraman Bert Glennon, but I can just see Godard watching it and flipping his lid.) Just about every frame in the film is composed as though it were being made for the Academy's consideration, and the settings are used to full advantage, from the actual interior of the LA Police Department to a grimy lunchroom to a little animal hospital to a big barn of a bank in Glendale. There's one scene that begins in total darkness, and suddenly a door at the right of the frame bursts open like a rectangular lightning bolt as the police bust in, throwing their shadows around in dramatic ways. I had to replay it three times.

I watched this a couple of nights ago, and I'm still high on it. It's on a double-bill DVD with Jack Bernhard's Decoy, which I'll talk about in my next post.

10.12.2007

28 Weeks Later




Robert Carlyle in 28 Weeks Later (dir. Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007).



Raymond Waring.



Mackintosh Muggleton and Imogen Poots.

Scary as hell, just like the first one. The big helicopter set piece in the middle of the film hits and misses at the same time, just like the blades: it's realistic enough to evoke the real horrors of war and terrorism, but hyperbolically silly enough to undermine itself. The really freaky moments are the quieter ones that take place in dark, claustrophobic spaces strewn with harmless but unnerving corpses. Some reviewers have made a lot of the role played by the American military in the story, trying to find a commentary on current events (Iraq? New Orleans?), but it's hard to distill a coherent critique from a fictional situation in which the abuse and the proper use of power end up indistinguishable from each other and equally inadequate. Oh, wait.

Ball of Fire




Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire (dir. Howard Hawks, 1941).



Lee Phelps, Dana Andrews ("How's about some benzedrine?"), and Addison Richards.



Dan Duryea.

Regulation screwball antics from Howard Hawks, with a fine cast. Dana Andrews, Dan Duryea, and Ralph Peters play gangsters Joe Lilac, Duke Pastrami, and Asthma Andrews, respectively. Duryea answers a phone call from Barbara Stanwyck as Sugarpuss O'Shea: "Hello Sugie ... sure it's Pastrami." The title refers to Stanwyck, and she lives up to it. Feigning a sore throat, Sugarpuss complains to Gary Cooper as Prof. Bertram Potts: "It's as red as the Daily Worker, and twice as sore."

10.11.2007

Macao




Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell in Macao (dir. Josef von Sternberg, 1952).

Another Howard Hughes production for RKO with Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell, all very enjoyable. Sternberg goes nuts with the location and its attending atmosphere, simultaneously exoticizing and de-exoticizing the Asian and Portuguese characters (some are "inscrutable," for example, but speak perfect English). Mitchum and Russell play beautifully together, and William Bendix is solid and affable as always. Gloria Grahame is handed a scrawny turkey of a role as the lead gangster's disgruntled moll, but invests it with enough graceful toughness to make it seem more than it is. Nice line from Russell: "Everybody's lonely and worried and sorry."

10.10.2007

The House on 92nd Street




FBI personnel at work in The House on 92nd Street (dir. Henry Hathaway, 1945).



Detainment and internment montage.



Surveillance operation.

The Naked City was the first film shot entirely on location in New York City, but The House on 92nd Street, which preceded it by three years, lays the groundwork for it. The films also share the device of the newsreel-style voiceover, which in House's case is so rooted in documentary materials that it was clearly designed in part to fool viewers into thinking they were watching a reenactment of historical fact. In truth, the story is a combination of two actual FBI cases, with the added fiction that the nazis almost had their hands on the plans for the atomic bomb. There's an interesting gender-related twist to the embellishments as well, which I won't say too much about. The good guys are earnest slabs of plywood, and the villains are reasonably colorful ogres (Signe Hasso is striking as stylish blonde she-wolf Elsa Gebhardt). The most engaging character appears for less than five minutes: George Shelton as a Vaudeville promoter, who delivers his lines naturally and gregariously ("Chess? Boy, there is a lousy game.").

10.09.2007

The Naked City




Nail-biting extra in The Naked City (dir. Jules Dassin, 1948).



Boy finds body floating in the East River.



Don Taylor.

Filmed entirely on location in New York City, Jules Dassin's big, hearty procedural borrows as much from newsreels and state-sponsored documentaries as from Italian neorealism. Producer Mark Hellinger's insistent voiceover is corny, but also an integral part of the movie's poignant tone of detached conviviality. Dassin has a knack for this effect, a mixture of generous sympathy for his characters and near-ironic fascination with the minutiae of incidental inflections and gestures that reduce subjects to caricatures: a heel on a bus whistles at a newspaper photo of the murdered model, and the woman standing behind him adopts a blankly bemused smirk; a pair of wrestlers pause in mid-embrace to answer police questions, their muscles frozen with stress throughout. It's obvious who the good guys and bad guys are, and which ones we're supposed to root for, but there is nevertheless a sense that none of the "eight million stories in the naked city" outweigh any of the others. We learn, for example, that shopkeepers and neighborhood children are fond of the murderous hoodlum Willie "the Harmonica" Garzah (Ted de Corsia), who looks down at the off-camera form of Don Taylor after knocking him out and chuckles, his face drenched with sweat, "That was a rabbit punch, copper--and it's strictly illegal."

10.08.2007

Killer Bait




Title frame for Killer Bait [a.k.a. Too Late for Tears] (dir. Byron Haskin, 1949).



Arthur Kennedy and Lizabeth Scott.



Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea.

Much of this film looks like it was shot in a cardboard box. This has more to do with Byron Haskin's just-adequate direction and the general low budget, I think, than with William Mellor's cinematographic skill, which is considerable (the degraded quality of the print doesn't help). But you know what? It doesn't even matter, because you've got Lizabeth Scott and Dan Duryea as two of the noiriest characters you've ever seen, and they play it for all it's worth. In fact, the overall crappiness of production values and lack of compositional gloss adds to the squalor of the story. A bag of money accidentally gets thrown into a married couple's car, and though the husband (Arthur Kennedy) wants to do the right thing and turn it in, he's a weak sap, and the wife (Scott) takes charge. Then the guy the money was really meant for (Duryea) shows up, and things get really ugly. Don DeFore enters the mix as a questionable man from the past and keeps everyone on their toes. There are all kinds of loose plot ends and half-baked motivations: it's hard to figure out how Scott gets Duryea to the point where he's going out and buying poison for her, but that's part of the beauty of it. These people are just going off half-cocked all over the place.

10.07.2007

Laura




Clifton Webb and Dana Andrews in Laura (Otto Preminger, 1944).



Gene Tierney complements blossoms with puffs of smoke.



Dana Andrews stuck in his skin.

Preminger's most celebrated noir, and with good reason (though I'm personally attached to Where the Sidewalk Ends). Everything works: the visuals, the music, the dialogue all thrum together like an elegant sonata. If there's anything "wrong" with it, it may be that it's all so sparkly and debonair that it's too high-class for pure noir--but that's where Dana Andrews saves the day. As the cynical detective who gradually becomes obsessed with the beautiful dead woman in the painting, he brings a grimy shadiness to his part that cuts the glare of all the sophistication surrounding him.

10.06.2007

The Spiral Staircase




Myrna Dell in The Spiral Staircase (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1945).

Starts off very stylishly with its mise en scene of small-town Americana circa 1916, our mute heroine Dorothy McGuire sitting transfixed in a movie theater watching a D.W. Griffith silent feature while in the apartment upstairs a shadowy serial killer claims a victim. It remains solid entertainment--and really scary, in its midcentury melodramatic way--from then on out, though once it gets locked into a single interior location (the obligatory spooky manor house) it feels a little stagy, and it's terribly obvious who the killer is from the moment the character is introduced.

10.05.2007

This Gun for Hire




Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire (dir. Frank Tuttle, 1942).



Veronica Lake.



Laird Cregar and Alan Ladd.

I hadn't watched this in a few years, and I had forgotten its flaws. For the first two thirds or so, it's crackling with hard-boiled energy (though there are inert patches here as well), but then we get the stuff about the hitman Raven's loveless childhood, a bunch of wartime we're-all-in-this-together hooey, and from there it's a predictable slope downward to the cheeseball ending. But even in the last third, there are some great moments, such as Ladd in a gas mask leading cowardly boob Laird Cregar to his doom. Other highlights: Ladd ripping Pamela Blake's dress and slapping her silly when she abuses his pet kitten; Pamela Blake hissing like a cat herself in response; Veronica Lake singing a sublimely silly song about magic tricks while doing magic tricks; Laird Cregar shuddering and blubbering the way he does.

10.04.2007

Eastern Promises




Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises (dir. David Cronenberg, 2007).

I had a little epiphany while watching Eastern Promises: another filmmaker David Cronenberg closely resembles in a key way is John Sayles. Both directors work with standard generic conventions (and they usually are conventions associated with genre narrative: horror, science fiction, crime), but throughout the course of the story, those conventions fade into the background, sometimes refusing to resolve themselves, or resolving themselves in deliberately cursory and anticlimactic ways. For both Sayles and Cronenberg, the conventions are red herrings, or expedient means to a larger purpose. In Sayles' case, that purpose is clearly political, and it is this that keeps me at arm's length from most of his work: not that I resist the political themes as such, but the inevitable flattening out of expected cinematic pleasures that results from the bait-and-switch. In a way, this happens in Cronenberg too, but in the first place, his politics are more challenging (if not necessarily more attractive), and in the second place, when he switches the bait, he never tries to situate what he replaces it with entirely outside the realm of the filmic like Sayles, but instead acknowledges the filmic as immanent to his larger purpose and does what he can to mess the art form up from the inside out. This is why Eastern Promises behaves on the surface like a gangster film, but reveals itself very quickly to be, like all Cronenberg's films, about prosthetics and fake blood. Lest it be objected that it's hard to accept these elements as the basis for a politics, remind yourself what century you live in.

Viggo Mortensen has become Cronenberg's ideal leading man: his face, stiff and menacing, is a prosthesis. So too Armin Mueller-Stahl, as the malevolent gangster king Semyon, is as leadenly impassive as one of Duane Edwards' vinyl sculptures. Even Naomi Watts, who concealed her pregnancy from Cronenberg until they had already begun filming, reveals some context-appropriate "padding." When one character's throat is slit (the second one, not the first one), the wound is so obviously made of latex that you want to stand up and cheer for the minor, temporary triumph of lo-fi auteurism over both the hegemony of bland "realist" drama and simulacral CGI illusionism.

See also Ron Silliman's comments. [Addendum: and Steven Shaviro and Kim Dot Dammit.]

10.03.2007

The Long Good Friday




Bob Hoskins in The Long Good Friday (dir. John Mackenzie, 1980).



Helen Mirren.



Bob Hoskins and Eddie Constantine.

The definitive modern British gangster film. Hoskins and Mirren take turns outdoing each other in portraying their unyielding delusions that they are capable of maintaining control over the personal empire they share. Eddie Constantine (of Lemmy Caution fame) as an American mafioso provides a coldly practical contrast to Hoskins' gung-ho enterpreneural fervor. The foundational irony of the setup--that gangsters who behave like capitalists are at odds with political extremists who behave like gangsters--gives way under the underlying, larger irony that this situation is closer to documentary than to allegory. The fluid camerawork by Phil Miheux (some of it handheld, but so steadily you can barely tell) and the searing electronic score by Francis Monkman complement each other perfectly, plunging the already precipitous narrative into a bloodcurdling tailspin.

10.02.2007

Prince of the City





Treat Williams in Prince of the City (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1981).

Sidney Lumet, I notice, has a thing for rows of nearly identical fenced-in back yards. This is one of those early-eighties dramas that still feels like a seventies film, in a good way: lots of brightly lit red, orange, and brown vinyl chairs and leisure jackets. I can't help but think that Scorcese drew some inspiration for Goodfellas from its unhurried, time-spanning narrative and scenes of suburban family life. You're always sort of aware that Treat Williams is aware that you're aware that he's acting, but it kind of fits the paranoid undercover scenario he's in. The tone and cadence of his voice as he calls a fellow cop to let him know that he's sold him and the rest of the force down the river sticks in your head: it's quietly, hysterically resigned, if that's imaginable.

10.01.2007

He Walked by Night




Richard Basehart in He Walked by Night (dir. Alfred Werker, 1948).

The docu-style police procedural that Dragnet was based on. Richard Basehart is flawless as a very blank young electronics whiz and cop killer. Nice touch: he has a cute dog. Jack Webb has a small role as a forensics expert. The finale in the LA storm drains is a fine showcase for John Alton's cinematography--too bad the print I saw was so poor.