bscottcork Saw this the other night on Movies-TV Film Noir Saturday Night. I read somewhere long ago that legendary director Marty Scorsese was sickly as a child and spent many days at the matinée in his native Brooklyn watching films. I could easily imagine him sitting in a darkened theater around 13 or 14 yrs old and being transfixed by this movie. It reminds me of "The Departed" with all the inside mob and cop snitching, replacing Richard Widmark in the Jack Nicholson role. Excellent caper film.

James Hitchcock "The Street with No Name" can be seen as a follow-up to "The House on 92nd Street" from three years earlier. Both use a semi-documentary style, were loosely based on actual events and were made with the deliberate purpose of highlighting the work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One character, FBI Inspector George A. Briggs played by Lloyd Nolan, appears in both films. "The House on 92nd Street", made in 1945 shortly after the end of hostilities, deals with the fight against Nazi espionage and subversion in wartime, whereas the later movie deals with the FBI's efforts to combat the post-war revival of what J. Edgar Hoover called "organized gangsterism".The action is set in the fictional "Center City", which could represent any major American city, although the film was actually shot in Los Angeles. It tells the story of an undercover FBI agent, Gene Cordell, who infiltrates a ruthless crime gang who have carried out a series of robberies in which two people have been killed. Cordell adopts the persona of "George Manly", a boxer and criminal, and is recruited into the gang by its leader, Alec Stiles.Seven years later the film was remade as "House of Bamboo" which, rather oddly, transferred the action to Japan although most of the main characters, and all the gangsters, remained American. The two movies had the same scriptwriter, Harry Kleiner, although they were made by different directors, William Keighley here and Samuel Fuller in the later film. Unusually for a crime drama from the fifties, Fuller made "House of Bamboo" in colour, whereas "Street with No Name" is made in the standard black-and-white film noir style. Kleiner added a major female character to "House of Bamboo" by giving Eddie (the equivalent character in that film to Cordell) a Japanese girlfriend, but the cast here are nearly all male. (Film noir tended to be a male-dominated genre, with women confined to secondary roles, although there were occasional exceptions such as "Gilda").Although "House of Bamboo" is visually attractive, I think that "Street with No Name" is the better film. The later film's exotic setting struck me as something of a gimmick, whereas here Keighley's photography of the "Skid Row" district of Center City, with its cheap flophouses, bars, amusement arcades and boxing gyms, achieves a certain gritty authenticity. There is a particularly strong performance from Richard Widmark as the dangerous, amoral Stiles. Widmark was later to appear in one of the all-time great films noirs, Fuller's New York-set "Pickup on South Street", which has a similar gritty look. I would not rate "Street with No Name" as highly as "Pickup" which has a more original storyline and a greater moral complexity; "Street with No Name", by contrast, tells a more straightforward, conventional "good guys against bad guys" tale of cops and robbers. It does, however, retain some points of interest even today. 6/10

ctomvelu1 Man, where do they dig up these golden moldies? A 1948 pre-television era programmer, STREET is the story of the FBI infiltrating a gang of robbers who have graduated to murder. It is told In semi-documentary fashion and uses a voice-over, which today makes it look absolutely hilarious, as if we were watching one of those 1950s duck-and-cover Cold War shorts. But when this baby finally gets going, it really gets going thanks to Richard Widmark as the incredibly nasty and nefarious head of the gang. Mark Stevens, an Alan Ladd lookalike without the acting talent, plays the FBI agent who infiltrates the gang. There are some very silly shots of Stevens running here and there, while being tailed by the bad guys the whole time, as he makes contact with his boss (who else but Lloyd Nolan) and other FBI agents. Widmark, who is superb as the chief bad guy, has put together a gang that acts like the East Side Kids in suits and ties. They're about as menacing and scary as -- well, they're not menacing or scary at all. Some decent location photography for the time. An historic curiosity.

dougdoepke From the stentorian prologue, you'd think it's organized crime and not organized Soviets about to take over the country. Either way the FBI gets a big image boost and an expanded role. As 40's film buffs know, a number of federal agencies got the docu-drama face-lift during this period, likely driven by Cold War needs. Note in this installment how public trust is located in federal authorities instead of more traditional local ones. Cynics might regard this as helping prepare the public for the growth of a post-war national security state.The real star here are the seedy locations from skid row San Pedro to boxing gym LA. Cameraman Joe McDonald does ace work getting a noirish feel that lends real eye appeal to the venues. However, Widmark has undergone a relaxant since his psychotic turn as Tommy Udo (Kiss of Death, 1947) and is not nearly as interesting. Still, those skeletal features are menacing enough. Blandly handsome Stevens gets the thankless agency-man role and is predictably colorless. Too bad these agency stereotypes aren't allowed at least some quirks.Wow, I really like Barbara Lawrence, all blonde hair and svelte figure. If I were Widmark I wouldn't bat her around so much, even if those brief scenes are the movie's liveliest. Then too, that final sequence should have been sent back for rewrite. It's not only unbelievable but also needlessly insulting to cops. Now, I'm no Pollyanna when it comes to the boys in blue, but can Widmark really count on cops just walking up and shooting someone, even under suspicious circumstances. The movie may be in the FBI's back pocket, but it's clearly not in the cop's. I'm just sorry a noir director, like Mann or Karlson didn't get the material first. Keighley is competent but lacks a feel for the complexities of evil, especially any kind of chaotic undercurrent. As a result, we get little more than an unmemorable procedure tale, cloaked in the atmospherics of noir but without the substance. The movie has some suspense and is entertaining, but if you think you've seen it before, you probably have.