Here’s Edward G. Robinson during his ‘Pinko’ Purgatory days, surviving Hollywood’s ‘Grey List’ making third-tier progammers. (Hardly a Communist Radical, Robinson ticked enough boxes to look suspicious: New Deal supporting Liberal Jew, New York theater background; Premature Anti-Fascist, yes, a real term of the time, as in being against Hitler pre-Pearl Harbor or supporting Spanish Civil War Republicans); and as a cultural intellectual.*) Directed by Arnold Laven, his second feature before life in serial tv, it’s a modest police procedural, less bad than dull. And forget that Vice Squad come-on title, instead one very full day in the life of Chief Detective Eddie G., solving a fistful of cases. Murdered cop; Kidnapping, Marriage bunko; Mental case; Drunk tipster; it might be a pilot for a tv series: Edward G. Robinson is KOJAK! I’d watch. With flat overlit mastershots indoors (for economy) and a bit of dark menace on exteriors, cinematographer Joseph Biroc the only tech here to reach A-list status. Not rising, second-billed Paulette Goddard, in decline after being dropped at Paramount in ‘49, her fast-fade hard to figure out. (Also Grey Listed?) Of the supporting players, Lee Van Cleef makes a mark, his hatchet face perking things up. There’s even a bit of suspense toward the end when a few cases climax with a single endgame. But still forgettable.
LINK: *The real deal that: Robinson’s art collection uncomfortably modern by Hollywood’s stultifying standard. Here’s a MoMA catalogue from 1953 (the year this film came out), forty paintings loaned: Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Corot, Lautrec, Modigliani, Monet, Gauguin, Degas, Chagall, Delacroix, Cezanne - all the usual suspects. https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_3301_300062120.pdf
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Three years later, ultra-conservative C.B. DeMille ‘cleansed’ Eddie G. hiring him for a juicy supporting role in THE TEN COMMANDMENTS/’56.
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