Open Secret

This is a creeping thriller of some very unpleasant character, as it gets worse all the time. The newly wed John Ireland visits a friend on his honeymoon, but as he reaches the friend's apartment, the friend is gone and lost, while his apartment is constantly being haunted by guys looking for something. It proves to be pictures, which are far too revealing for the taste of a criminal gang trying to develop into new nazis. The thriller is very well composed, it is logic and realistic all the way, the suspense keeps increasing as the plot thickens without mercy, and finally you'll even get the sensation of seeing John Ireland fighting with his hands pinioned - few actors have done that on the screen. John Ireland seldom got the opportunity to play the lead, he was usually cast as second hand gangsters, but here he actually shows off, and it might be his best picture. The terrific music adds to the atmospheric tension of the film.

John Ireland and Jane Randolph star in "Open Secret" from 1948, featuring Sheldon Leonard and Arthur O'Connell.

Nancy and Paul Lester (Randolph and Ireland) arrive in town and call an old friend of Paul's, Ed (Charles Waldron Jr.) who invites them to stay in his apartment, as hotel rooms are scarce. However, he has to go out, so the landlady lets them in.

They never do see Ed - he seems to have vanished. They find some White Supremacist pamphlets in his apartment. When Paul wants to have some of his photos developed, he finds some rolls of film in a drawer and decides to get them printed for Ed. He goes to a film developer, Strauss. They meet a woman on the street who says she never goes there, "you know why."

Turns out the town is rabid with anti-Semites, who have a secret grouup that kills Jews. Ed, it seems, was investigating them.

This is a low-budget answer to "Crossfire" and "Gentlemens Agreement," but it had a sinister undercurrent and unpleasant tone throughout. You really wanted this newly married couple to leave town.

I unfortunately saw a very poor print of this that had a lot of dark scenes that were hard to see. However, it was well-directed and the acting was good.

Amazing to think we still have to deal with this in the U. S. today.

The opening shot is an underlit traveling crane shot, followed by an upward-tilting Dutch angle of a series of backlit faces pronouncing "Guilty." It's an open secret this film was released in 1947, when every mystery was a film noir and every decent little guy faced a faceless conspiracy.

Charles Waldron Jr. tells his landlady that his old friend, John Ireland and his new bride, Jane Randolph, will be staying with him a few days. Then he hides a roll of film in his drawer and goes out. Eventually his houseguests notice he's gone and call in police sergeant Sheldon Leonard and gradually get entangled in a web of....

It's not the most subtly plotted of film noirs, and there's little mystery about what sort of nasty people are behind the evil doings, but it's certainly beautifully shot by horror-movie specialist George Robinson, and well performed by all hands. Director John Reinhardt was an Austrian actor who had switched to directing Spanish language movies for Fox in the early 1930s.

An offbeat thriller,which is also a plea for tolerance and a strong indictment of ordinary anti -Semitism , shortly after WW2 (two of the characters ,including the principal ,are former army pals ; the prologue, which ends with an ominous word (guilty) , the shirt, the booklets John Ireland finds in the drawer ("he may use them to wrap up his rubbish") , and a menace hanging in the air , these criminal people always called "they" , all this makes a fine film noir.

1947 saw the debut of the film "Gentleman's Agreement" in which Gregory Peck pretended to be Jewish in order to feel what it's like to be a Jew in America. Naturally, he experiences some discrimination but it's mostly very proper ('nice' anti-Semitism) and the leading man quite handsome. It was NOT particularly gritty and I always thought the film was amazingly tame...and a bit overdone. Here, a year later, a low-budget studio had decided to do a film like "Gentleman's Agreement"--but with more normal looking folks (no handsome Peck or John Garfield here) and in a more working-class neighborhood. And, in addition, the level of hate was ratcheted up...a lot. In fact, in this sick little town, a local hidden hate group has gone so far as kill Jews! John Ireland infiltrates this group of sickies and the film lacks the pretty polish but also seems a bit more gutsy and violent. Oddly, despite the publicity for the earlier film and critical acclaim, I prefer "Open Secret" as it is much more exciting and more like a variation on film noir. A great film? No...but it certainly is interesting and the problems don't seem so mundane as those in the Gregory Peck film. As a result, it shows a seedier and uglier side to ethnic hatred.