Walk a Crooked Mile (1948)

Agents O'Hara (Dennis O'Keefe) and Grayson (Louis Hayward) are investigating how nuclear secrets could have gotten out of the country and into the hands of evil Commies. Being that they ARE evil, the enemy will stop at nothing...including beating and shooting women...in order to destroy freedom and America. Are the pair smart enough and tough enough to win?What I liked most about this film noir picture is that it is unflinching and brutal for 1948. It's a very tough picture and really delivers for lovers of the genre. My only complaint is the use of a terrible cliche near the end of the picture. Agent O'Hara figures finally out who is passing on the secrets to the Russians but instead of telling everyone immediately over the phone, he tells them he'll meet them and tell them. You just KNOW that means that the enemy will then try to kill him before he has a chance to tell...an obvious plot device to say the least. Still, apart from that it's NOT cliched and well written.

This is one of the best espionage films ever made, for being so perfectly clever, realistic and actual in its day for the crisis of atomic secrets being smuggled to the Soviet Union, which really set the cold war off. Advanced nuclear technology is being smuggled out out from an extremely well guarded and sealed up atomic research centre, and it's impossible to understand how this is done. Five top scientists are the only ones privy to what is going on, and one of them is a traitor. Two of them are lovers, as one of them is a very beautiful woman. Raymond Burr is the very subtle villain here, he appears from the start and leads the way to the crisis and the ultimate meltdown, but the development to that climax is very careful and slow. As Dennis O'Keefe as the leading FBI investigator can't make head or tails of it on his own, a Scotland Yard agent is imported (Louis Hayward, always dashing,) and with his help they gradually approach the mystery. He even takes a job as a laundry worker to help things out, which nonetheless leads to serious trouble.It's a subtle thriller, and the final solution to the mystery couldn't have been more cleverly contrived, while the developed crisis on the way is no easy ordeal.

It occurred to me while watching this picture that if made just a few years earlier, it could have served well as a Sherlock Holmes film. A couple that come immediately to mind are "Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror" and "Sherlock Holmes in Washington". The difference though, in the case of "Walk a Crooked Mile", is the presence of those nasty Russian Commies in the place of Nazi agents. The opening screen narrative pays tribute to those federal agents who defend the country against saboteurs and no-goodniks who would 'walk a crooked mile' to do their dirty deeds.The story is tightly scripted with a number of twists and turns while teaming FBI Agent Dan O'Hara (Denis O'Keefe) with Scotland Yard counterpart Philip Grayson (Louis Hayward). O'Hara takes it upon himself to nickname Grayson 'Scotty' in service to his employer, I thought that was a rather nifty touch. The action takes place in Southern California and involves smuggling newly defined mathematical formulas out of the country by way of concealing them in artwork of San Francisco cityscapes. The intrigue involved in making this discovery was cleverly done, and though it occurs rather quickly for the sake of the story, one has to wonder about the number of man hours involved in the undercover work required to break a case like this.Just as in the Holmes films, proper devotion to the cause of patriotism on both sides of the Atlantic is displayed, but not in a way one might think and not via any of the principals. At one point, Grayson's landlady (Tamara Shayne) is roughed up, shot and killed by low-life Commie Krebs (an austere Raymond Burr), and with her dying breath, extols the virtue of a country that did so much for her. Grayson and O'Hara were suitably impressed.The film showed up on one of the cable channels in my area, featured as part of a noir film lineup, but for my money it more closely resembled an espionage thriller. It's got noir elements certainly, and if you want to consider Louise Albritton's role in the picture as your basic femme fatale, it would have worked, but she was eventually exonerated as part of the research lab team that included the traitors working for the Communists. I had to control my disdain for the character of Dr. Allen (Charles Evans) at the finale, one of the bad guys who disingenuously asserted his Constitutional rights when his treasonous role was discovered. Sounds kind of familiar when applied to present day, doesn't it?

WALK A CROOKED MILE is the sort of brisk, documentary style espionage yarn so often made during the '40s, using narration to tell the story of two espionage agents (DENNIS O'KEEFE and LOUIS HAYWARD) assigned to track down whomever is responsible for leaking top secret information developed at a nuclear plant in California.Most of the action takes place in San Francisco, where O'Keefe and Hayward discover that an artist (ONSLOW STEVENS) is putting coded information beneath his paintings when he receives it from a spy working for the government agency. The story traces how the spy ring operates and it is these details that give the film added interest before the spies are caught. All of the methods must seem dated by today's standards of F.B.I. work, but the manner of presentation is gripping and the clever cat-and-mouse game that is played between the agents and the spies is credible and fascinating.It's smoothly directed by Gordon Douglas at a fast clip. RAYMOND BURR has his usual "bad guy" role as one of he spies, and LOUISE ALLBRITTON, CARL ESMOND, ART BAKER and CHARLES EVANS all make interesting suspects in the mystery behind the identity of the key traitor.Well worth viewing.