John Chard
February 27, 2019
6
Laundry and Liquidation.
Walk a Crooked Mile is directed by Gordon Douglas and adapted to screenplay by George Bruce from a Bertram Millhauser story. It stars Louis Hayward, Dennis O'Keefe, Louise Albritton, Carl Esmond, Onslow Stevens and Raymond Burr. Music is by Paul Sawtell and cinematography by George Robinson.
A Scotland Yard detective and a FBI agent investigate what looks to be a spy ring infiltrating a top secret Nuclear Physics centre.
To fully get the drift you really have to understand the era when films like this were produced, a time of The HUAC and Cold War paranoia, when Hollywood itself was under scrutiny to weed out supposed communist infiltrators.
Good pro Gordon Douglas directs in a semi-documentary style - complete with Reed Hadley stentorian narration - in what turns out to be a decent spy like thriller. J. Edgar Hoover stuck his oar in to ensure no sanction of how the FBI looked was granted, which actually gives the pic some kudos, as does the superb Frisco location filming. It's nicely photographed in a noir style by Robinson, which lends one to lament he didn't operate more often in that style of film making. While perfs are absolutely fine, with Burr not for the first time in 1948 proving to be a great nasty presence.
Narratively it's hit and miss, the fear of the communist is solidly played, but actually the fear of the scientists is probably more sneakily bubbling away under the surface. There's a brilliant sequence of events that ties into Nazidom, with a landlady holding court for maximum impact, and for dramatic purpose the torture sequence and inevitable shoot out hit the right requisite notes.
Not a must see in the realm of Cold War/Spy Ring pictures, but entertaining and well mounted enough to keep it well above average. 6/10
Despite a decent effort from Louis Hayward as visiting Scotland Yard Inspector "Grayson", this is still a pretty clunky, charm-free, cold war espionage story that sees him team up with FBI counterpart "O'Hara" (Dennis O'Keefe) to investigate the smuggling of top secret formulae from a government facility to an enemy.... Their method of transferring the information is quite clever, but neither the script, nor the rather over-powering Reed Hadley narration really get this going. It has an almost documentary feel to it; the scenes are stitched together rather than fluid, and it comes across almost like a public information film about being beware of traitors in our midst (I found the culprit to be pretty obvious from the get-go), rather than to create any meaningful sense of suspense or drama. It has many of the usual set-piece cloak and dagger scenarios, and as ever with these type of stories - the baddies seem always unable to push home their obvious advantages! It's not dreadful, just procedural and rather dull.
