Full of guys with nicknames like Mutt, Shivvy and Whitey, 1948’s The Street with No Name is your tough, streetwise crime drama making many claims to authentiticity. It was one of a run of “semi-documentary” movies made around this time, often by Twentieth Century-Fox, and shot out on the streets, in the bars and at the racetracks where ordinary Americans lived their lives in the boom that followed the Second World War.
Don’t get too cosy is the message, delivered via stern voiceover and onscreen teleprinter in the film’s opening moments – gang activity is starting to re-assert itself now the peace has been won, it declares in so many words. If the gangster aren’t defeated, it goes on, four out of five Americans will become their victims. Signed: J Edgar Hoover, boss of the FBI.
Four out of five. The claim is a nonsense and the movie soon forgets it was ever made as it drills down into the story of a small gang (Organised? Barely) run by Alec Stiles (Richard Widmark), a hoodlum who runs his tight ship “along scientific lines”. The FBI decides to send a man in undercover to infiltrate Stiles’s gang, to find out if it’s responsible for a string of recent murders. Brave FBI man Gene Cordell (Mark Stevens) is dispatched to Skid Row, checks into a flophouse posing as two-bit grifter George Manly and sets about catching Stiles’s eye by playing the big man at Stiles’s boxing gym.
Soon Manly is inside the gang reporting back to the FBI, unaware that there’s someone inside the FBI reporting back to Stiles. It’s a bit like the plot for the great Hong Kong thriller from 2002, Infernal Affairs, which Scorsese remade as The Departed. But it’s more like the plot from 1955’s House of Bamboo, a Sam Fuller movie which lifted the gang-infiltration idea, and much else besides, from this movie and transposed the whole shebang, with a few hacks, to post-War Japan.
But back to the original, which insists on pausing here and there for what are little more than messages from our sponsor. We’re reminded, in repeated propagandistic cutaways to ballistics labs and data-crunching centres, that the FBI is also run “along scientific lines”, even though the outfit seems to be full of old guys in hats and big coats. Techy they ain’t.
Key man in the “force for good” message is Lloyd Nolan, playing decent, upstanding FBI lifer Inspector Briggs. Nolan had played the role before, in 1945’s The House on 92nd Street, which actually featured J Edgar Hoover onscreen, and Nolan is again the reassuring presence here. If there is a bad apple somewhere in the organisation, it’s not Inspector Briggs.
Widmark and Stevens are a good pairing. Widmark doing his psychotic gangster act and making Stiles the sort of guy who slaps his wife about for not being grateful enough that she’s married to him. (Slinky Barbara Lawrence is also pretty good here as the pre-feminist drudge attempting to assert herself and being met with violence.)
Stevens is good too. A handsome dude, in the scene in the boxing gym, where “Manly” climbs into the ring and clowns about to catch the (sexually ambiguous?) Stiles’s attention, he’s also funny, lithe and charismatic. Quite why he didn’t have a bigger career is a mystery.
William Keighley directs in a lean, no-nonsense style, and his DP, Joseph MacDonald, gives him stark black and white cinematography, with MacDonald showing off his talent for the docu-noir style both in the studio and out on the mean streets. He’d photograph Fuller’s remake, House of Bamboo, as well, in colour but with a similar eye for the bustle of street life.
There’s a little joke that the story is set in a place called Center City but was shot in LA, the city without a centre, but it’s got plenty of urban atmosphere, has the tang of the authentic and it works up a handful of good, tense scenes before climaxing at a shoot-out in an old munitions factory. The message again – the war may be over but don’t get too comfortable. Or put another way, don’t defund the FBI.
The Street with No Name – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
