Le témoin doit être assassiné

Through the first part of his career, Mickey Rooney was a kid and played 1001 different kid roles...and nearly all of them as swell boy next door sorts. During this time, he was an immensely popular actor and no one could have imagined him playing villains. Well, by the 1950s, Rooney was no longer a kid and times had changed and soon he began taking on meatier and nastier parts. In films like "Quicksand", "Baby Face Nelson", "Drive a Crooked Road" and "The Last Mile", he showed that he wasn't going to be typecast but could play real scumbags...and played them very well...particularly in "The Last Mile".

Here in "The Big Operator", Rooney is back playing villains. This time he's a Jimma Hoff-like guy who isn't above using violence to control the unions. At times, he comes off as a nice guy but if you cross him, he's a nasty sociopath....and mostly a sociopath! The authorities are trying to bring him to justice but he keeps pleading the Fifth and getting away with all sorts of atrocities.

When Bill (Steve Cochran) and Fred (Mel Tormé) just happen to be in the wrong place, they see union thug Joe Braun (Rooney) and this contradicts Joe's prior testimony...meaning at the very least he could be jailed for perjury. So, at first Joe offers the guys wonderful jobs as union organizers. And, when they turn him down, his goons turn up the heat. Eventually, they even light poor Fred ablaze....and Bill has had enough and agrees to testify against Joe. But then, the really nasty side of Braun and his goons appears...and they'll stop at nothing to stop Bill.

The casting of this film is very odd...though it works. Not only does Rooney play a thug, Steve Cochran (who OFTEN played thugs) plays the hero and Mel Tormé of all people plays Cochran's friend! Strange....but it worked. Overall, a great gritty film whose only downside is the ending...where occasionally the film was a bit hard to believe. Yet, despite this, it was very satisfying to watch.

Modestly budgeted but surprisingly entertaining crime drama, with Mickey Rooney as a Jimmy Hoffa-style union boss ready to resort to gangland methods when a couple of honest union men see him in the company of a known gangster the night that a witness against Rooney in an upcoming crime investigation goes missing.

This film has a nice jazzy musical score, and some unexpected casting. Rooney is effective with an in-your-face performance as the ruthless union president. But equally effective, and a nice change of pace casting for him, too, is Steve Cochran, normally a screen tough guy, here playing a soft spoken decent family man who crosses paths with Rooney. Ray Danton is a cold blooded hood working for the union boss who not only throws someone into a cement mixer but sets another person on fire after dumping him out of a car.

Vampira, pretty much unrecognizable without her Vampira makeup, is a woman running a beatnik club, Mel Torme plays Cochran's fiery natured friend (Mel's not bad), and, the most unusual casting of all is, ready for this, Mamie Van Doren in a subdued performance as Cochran's homemaker wife. She still looks like bleached blonde Mamie, of course, but she's not half bad. Mamie as Donna Reed? See it to believe it.

The film has a protracted sequence is which Cochran, who is ready to give testimony against Rooney, is kidnapped and Rooney has goons working him over (Leo Gordon being one of them, yikes!) to try to get him to change his testimony. When Cochran refuses to cooperate, Rooney then resorts to nastier means to get his way.

In 1959 the year The Big Operator came out the labor racketeering Senate hearings were occupying a lot of the televised news that year. Senator John F. Kennedy's presence got a lot of television exposure that year via the McClellan hearings into organized crime, not to mention his brother Robert F. Kennedy was the counsel for those hearings and first came into contact with Jimmy Hoffa.

Hoffa by all accounts was as nasty and pugnacious as Mickey Rooney as Little Joe Braun. And the Kennedy brothers would have told you he was as capable the deadly things he is as the head of a local of machinists here. Rooney's character is clearly based on Jimmy Hoffa. Hoffa was as short as Mickey Rooney in real life.

After constant badgering by committee counsel Peter Leeds as Rooney continually pleads the 5th amendment Rooney is tricked into saying he doesn't know contract killer Ray Danton who works for him. The only problem is that a couple of honest union members, Steve Cochran and Mel Torme saw the two of them outside Rooney's office. What to do?

What to do includes arson and kidnapping, setting Torme on fire and kidnapping Jay North who is Cochran's son. Not to mention beating up a blindfolded Cochran and telling him to lie before the committee if he wants to see his son alive again.

Mickey Rooney shows his considerable range as an actor in this film and it's nice to see Cochran as a good guy for a change. The film has one jarring note though all those who saw this in theater back in 1959 wouldn't agree. Mamie Van Doren gives a subdued performance as Cochran's wife and North's mother. But she's still the glamorous Mamie Van Doren, a poor man's Marilyn Monroe. Back when I was 12 when this came out I don't remember seeing any mothers who looked like that. No doubt she had everyone's hormones in a rage.

The Big Operator which also has a nice jazz score is a good snapshot of the times.

At five feet two inches, Mickey Rooney must have been Hollywood's smallest big operator. The words arrogant, deceitful and bigoted barely scratch the surface of this thoroughly odious character, immersed to the eyeballs in union corruption, underhand dealings and with a misguided view that anyone can be bought at the right price or, if necessary, with sufficient muscle, but not his!

He receives a mixed reception in addressing a blue collar meeting with a bumptious delivery of bad jokes and even worse puns, but his mood changes upon recognizing two individuals (Steve Cochran and Mel Torme), who could potentially identify him for his tawdry activities. In attempting to buy them off, Rooney encounters two insurmountable and previously alien obstacles: decency and integrity. Cochran, the diligent salt of the earth, family man, coolly dismisses him, whilst the more animated, vocal Torme sees red, (years before Zaz turned blue). Rooney's escalating exasperation with each must have driven his blood pressure off the scale, but at least the script writers offered some clemency, lightening his load, by allowing him to repeat the line, "I refuse to answer that question on the grounds of the Fifth Amendment" ad nauseam.

Kidnapping, torture, bullying picketts, the constant sense of threat, which results in Torme being burned on the same day he narrowly avoided being fired. This 'I'm Alright Jack' without the laughs turns surprisingly brutal, orchestrated by the mob heavy, safety in numbers clan, but curiously offset by an extravagant punch-up, rooted as much in comedy western as film noir.

Not exceptional, but a solid, grounded engaging statement on some of the salient issues of the time. Ultimately projecting an ethos of resisting violence and villainy every bit as pertinent today.

I loved this picture, The Big Operator, because it reminded me of the pictures I went to see as a young teenager in the late 50's. I remember seeing Steve Cochran in I Mobster at the time and really liked him. He's the good union man in The Big Operator, married to Mamie Van Doren, when he's approached to lie on the witness stand against the corrupt union boss played by the diminutive Mickey Rooney. Rooney, who is terrific, if not slightly over playing his James Cagney style Mr Nasty, has kidnapped Cochran's kid, played by Jay North. He's holding the kid in order to blackmail Cochran into retracting his evidence against Rooney. Ray Danton, Jim Backus, Jackie Coogan and Mel Torme are along for the ride as well as some other famous characters in smaller parts. Torme, or the velvet fog, is surprisingly effective as Cochran's tough little pal. For a world class jazz singer, he's a surprisingly good actor too. The underrated Leo Gordon is on hand for the really brutal stuff and he should have made it much bigger on screen as he was an actor at the time in a similar vein to Charles Bronson. I believe he was also a successful writer for movies. The ending is a bit far fetched but this little B movie gripped me from beginning to end and Rooney and Cochran are worth the entrance fee.