La grande menace

The film's stark and scrumptious cinematography is why you should watch. George Robinson and Edward Colman do an absolutely fantastic job. Noir fans will appreciate the film's use of shadows to create a tense mood.

The plot will hold your interest: with the help of a U. S. government worker(s) top secret atomic research work is being stolen by a communist spy ring. FBI agents, with the aid of Scotland Yard, work against time to stop the theft.

Louis Hayward plays the Scotland Yard agent and Dennis O'Keefe is his FBI counterpart. The two have chemistry together.

There is a blandness, though, to much of the crime investigation procedural part of the film - which is extensive. There's no love interest for any of the main characters. In fact, there's only one female character in the film and she doesn't have any substantial speaking lines until late in the movie.

Well-made political thriller. 1948 is the year Hollywood joined the anti-communist crusade, and there's no mistaking the bad guys-- Raymond Burr in a Lenin-like goatee, a sinister gathering of "comrades", and Hollywood's version of commie rhetoric about how the individual doesn't matter in the global scheme of things. Up to that point, the studios had been turning out generally pro-Soviet films in behalf of our WWII allies. But now, turning on a dime, we find out what perfidious characters we had been supporting. Oh well, as they say, in politics there are no permanent friends or enemies, only permanent interests.

Square-jawed Dennis O'Keefe makes for a dogged and intrepid FBI agent aided by Scotland Yard loan-out Louis Hayward. Together, they show what sterling fellows the English-speaking world turns out. They're on the trail of a covert Soviet spy sneaking out secrets from what is likely a bomb designing laboratory, though it's never specified. The plot rather prophetically anticipates the Klaus Fuchs affair of 1949, when the German-born spy was exposed as smuggling A-bomb secrets to the Soviets as early as 1945.

The suspense revolves around who the lab spy is and how he's getting the secrets out. It makes for entertaining, if workman-like, viewing. The familiar narrator Reed Hadley lends stentorian authority, along with some fine location photography. Together they impart a sense of reality to what are otherwise standard stereotypes and a melodramatic plot. Sure it's Hollywood's manipulative brand of political cinema, this time turned on our former friends. But at least it's watchable, minus the kind of cold-war hysteria that came to characterize other efforts of the period. All in all, an interesting and revealing reflection of its time.

1948's Walk a Crooked Mile bursts out of the stale post-war semi-documentary format to become an absorbing espionage drama, thanks to: *Carefully rationed, no-nonsense writing (screenplay by George Bruce; story by longtime veteran Bertram Milhauser (over 60 film treatments in 50 years!); *Sharp and spare direction (by the versatile Gordon Douglas - said to be the only person to direct both Elvis and Sinatra). Filming took less than a month; * Watchful camera (cinematography by George Robinson), and enchanting location work in the beautiful San Francisco of nearly three-quarters of a century ago; * Unobtrusive acting by leads Dennis O'Keefe as an FBI agent and Louis Heyward as his Scotland Yard counterpart; * Enough angles and twists to keep you guessing to the very last frame; *And shrewd bit-casting (with an unexpected throat-catching moment lasting less than 20 seconds that you will remember for a long time , from veteran ...and uncredited... actress Tamara Shane - Moma Yoelson in The Jolson Story (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (1949) and Mrs Akim Tamiroff in real life -- as The Landlady).

All this cinematic professionalism produces so much edge and vitality that a virtually unheralded, almost forgotten 1948 Cold War Feds 'n Reds potboiler is transformed into a surprisingly compelling action movie, complete with smart detective work, a rats' nest of sneering villains (look for a hirsute, almost svelte and quite nasty Raymond Burr), unexpectedly tense car chases and really noisy Thompson sub-machine guns.

The crafty script doesn't pull at its leash, begging for attention, but instead remains in the background, a steadily ticking clock mechanism -- or perhaps a time bomb -- pushing the nail-biting action forward, with twists and turns at every corner.

Using the documentary style format complete with the stentorian baritone of Reed Hadley, indispensable voice-of-God in the "official" crime dramas of the time, this Columbia Pictures black-and-white feature zeroes in on one of the most disquieting aspects of the Cold War: theft of nuclear secrets.

Atomic plants worry about two kinds of leak: radiation and security. In the fictional Southern California research lab of Walk A Crooked Mile, it's a security leak that has the FBI's Geiger Counters ticking away madly. Vital secrets are being stolen by an unnamed foreign power. (Soviet Russia is never named, but there are plenty of "comrades" and "dictatorship of the proletariat" speeches bandied around by un-American conspirators as to leave no question just which Pravda-subscribing Great Bear is after our Atomic Honey. Besides, villain Raymond Burr is wearing a goatee just like Lenin's!)

Because of the international ramifications of the thievery, the FBI (Dennis O'Keefe) and Scotland Yard (Louis Hayward) join forces to try and catch the red crooks.

Unique among FBI films of the period, the "Chief" is never seen or heard: J. Edgar Hoover is never even mentioned! Indeed, the producer, Edward Small, had had no cooperation from the agency, and Director Hoover had even written a letter to the New York Times complaining that the movie had not been sanctioned by the Bureau. (Reportedly, Walk a Crooked Mile had been originally titled FBI vs Scotland Yard but this was changed at Mr. Hoover's request.)

Despite this official hands-off policy, there is an air of authenticity about the proceedings as the sleuths employ the latest technology in an attempt to uncover the spy ring. The technology may seem to be on a kids' chemistry set level to our sophisticated eyes three-quarters of a century later, but the agents from the FBI and Scotland Yard use their brains as well - and this display of sharp wits is a nice change from the robotic by-the-numbers G-Man tales of the time. And lots of unexpected curves along this crooked mile keep you guessing for every minute of a wild ride.

A good spy thriller, with astute detective work neatly balanced by the occasional bout of violent action.

WALK A CROOKED MILE is the sort of brisk, documentary style espionage yarn so often made during the '40s, using narration to tell the story of two espionage agents (DENNIS O'KEEFE and LOUIS HAYWARD) assigned to track down whomever is responsible for leaking top secret information developed at a nuclear plant in California.

Most of the action takes place in San Francisco, where O'Keefe and Hayward discover that an artist (ONSLOW STEVENS) is putting coded information beneath his paintings when he receives it from a spy working for the government agency. The story traces how the spy ring operates and it is these details that give the film added interest before the spies are caught. All of the methods must seem dated by today's standards of F.B.I. work, but the manner of presentation is gripping and the clever cat-and-mouse game that is played between the agents and the spies is credible and fascinating.

It's smoothly directed by Gordon Douglas at a fast clip. RAYMOND BURR has his usual "bad guy" role as one of he spies, and LOUISE ALLBRITTON, CARL ESMOND, ART BAKER and CHARLES EVANS all make interesting suspects in the mystery behind the identity of the key traitor.

Well worth viewing.

Interesting docunoir about atomic/nuclear formulas being syphoned out of the Lakeview facility in the USA and finding their way into the iron curtain via the UK.

This is a very early example of FBI-Scotland Yard cooperation, showing the sophistication that already existed immediately after WWII, in spite of much more rudimentary spying technology than we have today. Amazing how sound was recorded on LPs, and 16 or 8mm cameras were used at stakeouts.

With Reed Haley as the narrator, the viewer gets the low-down on an intricate international operation to detect why fomulas are spirited out of the USA in art form -- paintings which, as agent O'Hara (O'Keefe) memorably points out, only suffer from having "too much red" in them.

As ever, O'Keefe is very convincing as an FBI agent, Hayward likewise as his Scotland Yard counterpart, and you can see that it is not the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but one that is already firmly in place.

Massey would have deserved a better part, and I found Onslow Stevens and Charles Evans very effective and chilling top villains. Allbritton is a beautiful woman, pity we see so little of her

Photography and action sequences top notch. Recommended.