Roadblock (Harold Daniels, 1951)

Charles McGraw and Joan Dixon in Roadblock

Cast: Charles McGraw, Joan Dixon, Lowell Gilmore, Louis Jean Heydt, Milburn Stone. Screenplay: Steve Fisher, George Bricker, Richard H. Landau, Daniel Mainwaring. Cinematography: Nicholas Musuraca. Art direction: Albert S. D'Agostino, Walter E. Keller. Film editing: Robert Golden. Music: Paul Sawtell. 

You know that movie about the insurance man who commits a crime for a femme fatale? No, not Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). That one starred Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. This one stars Joan Dixon and Charles McGraw, and it's called Roadblock. It was directed by Harold Daniels, an actor who turned B-movie and later TV director. Double Indemnity is a classic and Roadblock is ... well, not too bad. McGraw plays Joe Peters, an insurance investigator who falls for an attractive woman he encounters in an airport. She's Diane Morley (Dixon), a sometime model headed for LA in hopes that she'll strike gold in some guy's wallet. He's exactly not what she's looking for, a guy who makes $350 a month, but they wind up together anyway. Eventually, he'll use his knowledge as an investigator to bring off a million-dollar mail car heist, all for love. It won't end well. McGraw is effective as a soft-hearted tough guy who falls hard for the woman he loves. Dixon's performance, however, is less successful. She starts out as a tough girl on the make and becomes mistress of a mobster (rather swishily played by Lowell Gilmore), but falls so hard in love with Joe that she's willing to live on his salary after all. I doubt that even Stanwyck could have brought off the role as written, and Dixon certainly can't. Still, the plot is nicely complex and it moves along so swiftly. There are worse ways to spend 73 minutes.

T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947)

T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947)

Cast: Dennis O'Keefe, Alfred Ryder, Wallace Ford, Charles McGraw, Mary Meade, Jane Randolph, June Lockhart, Art Smith, Herbert Heyes, Jack Overman, John Wengraf, Jim Bannon, William Malten. Screenplay: John C. Higgins. Cinematography: John Alton. Art direction: Edward C. Jewell. Film editing: Fred Allen. Music: Paul Sawtell.

With its tough-guy cast, suspenseful screenplay, and superb noir-and-white cinematography by John Alton, T-Men is only slightly hindered by efforts to sell itself as a ripped-from-the-headlines True Story. It has a heavy-handed opener featuring the real head of the Treasury Department's investigative division, Elmer Lincoln Irey, selling us on the idea that the IRS is really our friend, and an ongoing voiceover narrative by the actor Reed Hadley that provides exposition we mostly don't need -- it could easily have been integrated into the dialogue. These flaws aside, the film has real grit as it follows T-man Dennis O'Brien (Dennis O'Keefe) and his partner Tony Genaro (Alfred Ryder) in their investigation of a counterfeiting scheme, encountering the usual menacing thugs and hard-bitten dames. Neither of the good guys has it easy, getting beat up and shot as they sleuth through the seamy side of '40s Los Angeles. Alton's camera gives us expressionistic angles and sinister shadows as it explores some well-chosen locations from Chinatown to a Turkish bath to the waterfront.

The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946)

Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner, at the start of their Hollywood careers, shine out against the noir background of The Killers like the stars they became. Which is perhaps the only major flaw in Robert Siodmak's version of -- or rather extrapolation from -- Ernest Hemingway's classic short story. They're both terrific: Lancaster underplays for once in his film career, which began with this movie, and no one was ever so beautiful or gave off such strong "bad girl" vibes as Gardner. But their presence tends to upend the film, which really stars Edmond O'Brien and a fine cast of character actors. Hemingway's story accounts for only the first 20 minutes or so of the film, the remaining hour of which was concocted by Anthony Veiller, John Huston, and Richard Brooks. In the Hemingway part of the movie, two hitmen (William Conrad and Charles McGraw) enter a small-town diner looking for their target, a washed-up boxer they call "the Swede." They bully the diner owner and tie up the cook and Nick Adams (Phil Brown), but when they decide that the Swede isn't going to show up for his usual evening meal, they leave. Nick runs to warn the Swede, Ole Anderson (Lancaster), in his rooming house, but the man exhibits only a passive acceptance of his fate. The short story ends with the Swede turning his face to the wall and Nick returning to the diner, but in the film we see the hitmen arrive at the rooming house and kill the Swede. What follows is a backstory that Hemingway never bothered with -- although he later told Huston that he liked the movie -- about an insurance investigator's probe into the killing. The Swede had left a small insurance policy, and when the investigator, Reardon (O'Brien), contacts the beneficiary he begins to find threads that lead him back to an earlier payroll heist. With the help of a friend on the police force, Lubinsky (Sam Levene), who knew the Swede from his boxing days, Reardon sorts out the tangled story of what happened to the loot and how the Swede became the target of a hit. Siodmak's steady hand as a director earned him an Oscar nomination, as did Arthur Hilton's editing and Miklós Rózsa's score, which features a four-note motif that was lifted by composer Walter Schumann for the familiar "dum-da-dum-dum" title music of the 1950s TV series Dragnet, leading to a lawsuit that was settled out of court. Veiller was also nominated for the screenplay, but the contributions of Huston and Brooks went uncredited, largely because they were under contract to other studios.