Note: Raymond Burr built up quite a reputation playing villains in the late 1940s and early 1950s. For instance, he plays a gangster who steals a diamond in the Martin & Lewis comedy You’re Never Too Young in 1955. Nothing, not even seeing Brother Ray, will induce me to watch a movie in which zany hijinks ensue when grown-man Jerry masquerades as a 12-year-old child to recover the diamond. Just the premise makes me breathe shallow.
Walk
a Crooked Mile
1948 / 1:31
Tagline: “Smash Up of a Spy Ring!”
[internet archive]
Raymond Burr plays the muscle for a gang of Communist spies during the early Cold War era. Their mission is to steal nuclear secrets from a facility in California. The FBI, however, gets hot on their trail because of a tip from Scotland Yard.
Burr plays Krebs, a Communist thief out to steal atomic secrets. Conveying a sense of menace and danger, his character adds tension and intrigue to the film. He beats people up. He picks secrets up at a drop in an 24/7 laundry. He takes part in a climactic shoot-out. Looking as if he is tipping the scales at nearly 300 pounds, he wears a suit floppily that calls to mind a loose-fitting Japanese samue. A trim beard makes him look a tidy saboteur. The beard also makes him conspicuous in a population where clean-shaven is the norm and expectation. I would think the last look a spy would go after is conspicuous and memorable.
The FBI agents are played persuasively as smart dedicated men who are human enough to make mistakes. They conduct muggings to relieve persons of interest of evidence and commit B&E to toss apartments. They enter hazardous situations with no back-up. They carry precious evidence out of the office instead of locking it up. They leave suspects by themselves after they’ve been interrogated. They are fooled when the Communist spies disguise themselves as clergymen. They use “Slavic” to describe a “nationality” when in fact it is an “ethnicity.” Just as prone to as anybody else, they are subject to thinking errors like overgeneralizing, filtering, and anchoring.
None of my quibbles detract from the basic messages that 1) the Communists use vicious means in pursuit of their inhuman ends and 2) the FBI is working diligently to counter this menace. I never got the feeling that the anti-Communism in this movie was the dumb hysterical anti-communism that brought into disrepute principled anti-communism. In one scene an immigrant landlady in San Francisco glares at Burr and says heroically, defiantly, “My whole family was killed by men like you because they didn’t answer questions. I’m the last one that’s not going to answer questions.”
The production is very smooth and easy to look at it. Noirish angles and scenes of shadows and light dramatize the good guys and demonize the bad guys as they develop plans to counter each other. The voice-over and jiggly camera give a feeling of a documentary. The voice-over is omniscient so it takes us into Communist meetings which is a little strange.
As I always say, I’m easy-going and open to meeting movies where they are coming from, so I liked the tense process of breaking up the spy ring. The film itself, directed by Gordon Douglas, is considered a solid example of Cold War-era film noir, blending crime thriller elements with political intrigue.
As for the connection with the original Perry Mason TV series, Frank Ferguson plays the owner of a laundry that is a drop for the Communists. Shocking he is a spy because he looks like the personification of Midwestern Reliable. He was a Sheriff in TCOT Perjured Parrot, an expert in TCOT Angry Dead Man, and another sheriff, though more of a dimbulb martinet, in TCOT Bluffing Blast. But his best performance was as good old Walter, the faithful friend of Frances Reid of in The Case of the Golden Venom.
Please Murder Me (1956) [internet archive]
[my
review]
I Love Trouble (1948) [internet archive] [my
review]
Sleep My Love (1948) [internet archive] [my
review]
Ruthless (1948) [internet archive] [my
review]
Pitfall (1948) [internet archive] [my
review]
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