Criminosos de Detroit

A couple of Irish film stars, Pat O'Brien and Dennis O'Keefe star in Inside Detroit, a city not known for being the location of too many films. The Robocop films and the Mark Wahlberg film Four Brothers are the only other ones that come to mind.

Detroit may be still the most heavily unionized city in the continental United States due to the automobile industry. In fact the line between the United Auto Workers and the Democratic Party of Michigan is all, but erased. At the time that Inside Detroit was filmed, over half of the workers in the USA were unionized as opposed to less than 25% today. It was a different world.

Racketeers moving in on unions is an old story. In New York City it was the garment industry, in Detroit its automobiles.

When a bomb goes off in a union hall killing Dennis O'Keefe's brother, he springs into action. He knows the man responsible is Pat O'Brien and the rest of the film is dealing with how to bring him down.

For one of the few times in his career O'Brien is a bad guy. A seemingly respectable married man, wife and two kids, Katharine Warren and Mark Damon and Margaret Field, he's also got one hush/hush mistress on the side in vice madam Tina Carver.

Without saying what happens, it's on the family front that O'Keefe works to bring O'Brien down.

The film is competently made with some nice shots of Detroit in the prosperous Fifties. O'Keefe's character as hero is good, but fairly one dimensional.

My guess is that if you're willing to accept Pat O'Brien as an adulterous villain, you will like Inside Detroit.

The only crime films directed by Fred S Sears - and there were four of them - were all exposes: CHICAGO SYNDICATE, MIAMI STORY, MIAMI, INSIDE DETROIT. Of course there was the lousy ESCAPE FROM SAINT QUENTIN, totally forgettable, and the RUMBLE ON THE DOCKS, some kind of poor man's copy of ON THE WATERFRONT; more or less.... This one is a solid little film, and as an expose, you have the off voice of a narrator. It is quite agreeable to have Pat O'Brien as a villain, gang boss. This is for me the main interest in this movie, more than if it had been Neville Brand or George McReady as the bad guy in chief. Don't despise this one, please.

Soon to be released after a five year prison stretch, mob kingpin Gus Linden (Pat O'Brien) plots to seize control of the local auto workers union over which he formerly presided. When a bombing attempt he ordered at the local union hall fails to take out his intended target, the new hard nosed union president Blair Vickers (Dennis O'Keefe), Linden has to develop an alternate plan. Upon his arrival back in town Linden a sociopath and all around horrible human being, drops by his house just long enough to say hello and have a piece of cake with his family before he takes off to a party that he ordered for himself to celebrate his release. There he meets up with his ex-girlfriend (Tina Carver) who runs a "modeling agency" and his former criminal associates to launch a plan that will eliminate Vickers once and for all. Vickers, whose brother was killed in the bombing of the union hall, decides to play hardball himself and isn't above a few ruthless tactics of his own.

'Inside Detroit' is another of the 1950's expose' style semi-documentaries that sensationalized the soft white underbelly of urban crime popularized by scandal sheet tabloids of the era. The opening narration begins with authoritative commentary by John Cameron Swayze lauding Detroit as a symbol of virtue and United States economic might but unfortunately as with many other cities it has become a syndicate infested cesspool. Soon begins the plight of the common man to fight back against the entrenched criminal machine.

Seeing this was a Sam Katzman Production directed by Fred Sears, I was pleasantly surprised by the production quality. Katzman and Sears who teamed up for multiple features such as The Giant Claw and Calypso Heat Wave usually worked like every dollar was the last they would ever see. Here they use actual Detroit locations which adds weight to the texture of the film. A shout-out to Cinematographer Henry Freulich who from time to time seems to channel his inner John Alton with shots and angles reminiscent of another Dennis O'Keefe film, 'T-Men'.

A fun romp into another era and style of film making.

John Cameron Swayze, the prominent TV newscaster from the early 1950s, ushers us in and out of this peek into mob infiltration of the trade unions. The mid-20th-century powerhouse cities like Detroit and Cleveland and Pittsburgh, now buckles on the rustbelt, would seem ideal settings for the gritty stories of the noir cycle, but precious few were set there; for both economic and esthetic reasons, coastal corruption was preferred.

A cache of nitroglycerine jammed into a pinball machine at a union local, just two days before Christmas, sends flames into the sky and Dennis O'Keefe's brother to kingdom come. He knows the conflagration was the work of mobster Pat O'Brien, just released from a spell in prison but determined nonetheless to extend his empire into the auto trades.

O'Brien's doting wife and his two grown kids (hothead Mark Damon and nice girl Margaret Field) are in denial about dad's brutal career and in ignorance of his involvement with a flashy entrepreneuse in the world of vice (Tina Carver). Until Damon, drunk but determined to defend his family's honor, breaks in O'Keefe's apartment and tries to kill him. (When O'Keefe roughs up his assailant, his police bodyguard stops him by warning, `You're bending his jacket!').

The rest of the movie is a pretty tight, and violent, cat-and-mouse game between O'Keefe and O'Brien – a good, old-fashioned Irish vendetta. In an Oedipal twist, Damon falls prey to Carver's lures; Field, hospitalized after a car crash, starts to see that her dad may not be the grand old blarney-bag he pretends to be. But the key to stopping O'Brien proves to be hard-case Carver....

Coming late in the post-war crime-movie cycle, Inside Detroit ends up being more a civic-minded, law-and-order homily than a morally ambiguous drama. But its casting of veterans O'Brien and O'Keefe (only nine years his junior, but playing much younger), coupled with brisk pacing and a decent story, mark it as a movie that oughtn't to have been so neglected. After all, it's Motor City's only moment in the dark sun of the noir cycle.

John Cameron Swayze does the intro and outro to this movie, without mentioning Camel cigarettes or Timex watches. Racketeer Pat O'Brien gets out of jail and goes to work to win the next UAW local election, part of "the Syndicate's" plans to take over the unions. Dennis O'Keefe is the honest union official flailing around to keep control. Mark Damon is O'Brien's son, and Tina Carver is the girl who's been running the rackets and making a play for Damon. The police are baffled.

It's a grand cast for a Sam Katz movie, and it's directed by the indefatigable Fred Sears. He had come to Hollywood after the War. By 1958, the year he died at 44 of a heart attack, he had appeared in seventy-five movies and directed 50. With a schedule like that, it's no wonder his bosses loved him; he didn't have time to come in over schedule or budget.

Even so, there's more to this movie that a tawdry story and good actors. Director of Photography Henry Freulich gets some nice point-of-view shots of a fight taking place on exposed girders. Everyone helps makes this, if not a great movie, at least a good one.