La grande minaccia

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.

A 1948 film noir/police procedural. We're in the midst of the Cold War & American agents are on the hunt for Communist operatives which sets the scene as one of ours sees a wanted agent at a sporting event only to be gunned down (shocking for the time I would imagine as we see blood spatter across the man's face) by Raymond Burr (sporting a very Leninesque goatee). Enter the lead FBI agent, played by Dennis O'Keefe, who tracks the spotted man to San Francisco only to find the man murdered in his room even though the FBI were all over him. When they scour their surveillance footage they come up w/another enemy agent, disguised as a priest (which raised no flags), who spends his days in his apartment painting canvases which O'Keefe figures is the means of transporting information. Enter Louis Hayward, a Scotland Yard agent working the same case from the European side of things & he teams up w/O'Keefe to track down the cabal of enemy agents (the info in question is coming from a scientific collective on the cusp of a breakthrough) when they figure out hidden formulas are embedded on the paintings themselves, they figure one of the group is leaking the info. Very procedural in the extreme (I wouldn't be surprised if some would viewers will drop in the ubiquitous "dun dun" from Law & Order as each scene cuts into the next) but immensely engrossing, keeping you on the edge of your seat w/a satisfying gunfight taking place in a darkened home festooned w/Russia's best trying to win the day.

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.

Dennis O'Keefe, (Daniel O'Hara) plays the role as a FBI Agent who is in charge of finding out how a Southern California atomic plant is having leaks of top secret plans and why one of their agents is killed trying to find out this important information. Scotty Grayson, (Louis Hayward) is a Scotland Yard Inspector who is also called into the FBI office and is working with Daniel O'Hara because he has some important information that can help to solve this case. Raymond Burr, (Krebs) plays the role as a communist who is a very dangerous man who will stop anyone trying to upset their plan to obtain this secret information. This picture is dealing with the Cold War period in history and the scientists in the atomic plant are all under investigation. This film is very entertaining and Dennis O'Keefe gave a great performance along with Raymond Burr just starting out his career and giving a great supporting role. Enjoy.

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.