Vice Squad (1953)

Vice Squad (AKA The Girl in Room 17) is a 1953 crime film. It’s included in one of Kino Lorber’s film noir boxed sets so you know there’s very little chance it will be a film noir. It isn’t. It’s a straightforward police procedural.

You might assume that this is a B-movie but the 88-minutes running time is a clear indication that that is not technically the case although it’s clearly a rather low-budget production. It’s a United Artists release.

Captain ‘Barnie' Barnaby (Edward G. Robinson) is chief of detectives. His day begins with a cop getting shot when a car is stolen, but circumstances suggest there might be more to it. There’s a witness but he’s smart enough not to talk to cops without having his lawyer present.

Barnie receives some information about a planned bank robbery. He stakes out the bank.

Meanwhile he works on that reluctant witness. Barnie uses the standard police methods, denying the witness his legal rights, detaining him illegally, harassing him and framing him for crimes he did not commit. It’s all in a day’s work for this cop.

Barnie also thinks he might get some information from Mona Ross (Paulette Goddard). Mona runs an escort service. It seems to be semi-legal, with the girls being no officially call girls. She still gets regular harassment from the cops. The arrangement seems to be that she’s allowed to stay in business as long as she acts as a snitch for the cops.

Barnie’s stakeout goes badly wrong, putting members of the public in danger. Two of the gang members make their getaway with a girl as hostage.

My problem with this movie is that we’re supposed to accept Barnie as a noble cop hero but he tramples all over citizens’ legal rights, intimidates a witness into giving phoney evidence and abuses his powers in every way imaginable. Almost everything he does is unethical, illegal, immoral and unconstitutional. We’re supposed to think this is OK, that it’s perfectly acceptable for cops to be above the law.

Of course viewers today may be tempted to see this as a deliberate attempt at moral ambiguity, with the cops breaking the law just as much as the crooks. You do have to be careful not to read things into old movies, things that may never have been intended. On the other hand you also have to be careful not to assume that movie-makers of the past were incapable of making movies that worked on more than one level, or that dealt with moral murkiness.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that screenwriter Lawrence Roman (and the author of the original novel Leslie T. White) did have some awareness that the cop hero here is in danger of becoming morally compromised.

This gives the movie perhaps a very slight noir flavouring.

Edward G. Robinson didn’t want this part but he needed the money. At times he’s good, at other times he seems to be just phoning it in.

Paulette Godard is the standout performer here, showing some enthusiasm and flair.

The supporting players are all quite competent. Lee van Cleef makes an appearance in a minor supporting role.

There’s a reason you’ve never heard of director Arnold Laven. He spent most of his career in television. He does a fairly sound job here. Cinematographer Joseph F. Biroc manages some noirish atmosphere.

So Vice Squad is a flawed but interesting police procedural. Recommended.

Kino Lorber have provided a very nice Blu-Ray transfer. Gary Gerani’s audio commentary is a worthwhile extra.

Cop Hater (1958)

Cop Hater is a 1958 American crime B-movie based on one of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels.

Since it’s a crime movie shot in black-and-white a lot of people have succumbed to the temptation to assume it’s film noir. It isn’t. Not even close. It’s a tough police procedural, just as the Ed McBain novels are police procedurals.

It’s a hot day in the city. Apparently all it takes is a hot day and everyone goes crazy and starts killing people. A cop named Reardon gets gunned down in the street. Reardon was a paragon of virtue, almost the perfect cop. Why would anyone want to kill him?

Then another cop gets killed. He was pretty much a candidate for sainthood. It doesn’t make sense.

The police are pretty upset. Murder is an everyday occurrence and it’s no big deal but cop killing is a very big deal indeed. The lieutenant in charge gives his men a speech about how cops are symbols of everything that holds society together. Kind of like the flag, and motherhood.

The cops figure the killer could be from a teen gang. After all these crazy kids today kill for kicks. So we get some prime 50s juvenile delinquent hysteria.

The police have no real evidence. They pull in lots of suspects who are really never serious suspects to begin with and the case is going nowhere.

The lieutenant in charge is getting frustrated. He’s a bit bad-tempered by underneath he has a heart of gold. All the cops in this movie have hearts of gold.

This movie goes through the motions of being a police procedural. They do some routine police work. They do some forensic stuff and they call on a few informers. These things go nowhere in plot terms. The plot relies on the hoary old device of the hero having a sudden inspiration. So as a true police procedural it’s a bit of a non-starter.

As a murder mystery it works fine although it suffers from a lack of a sufficient number of genuinely plausible suspects.

This is certainly not film noir. In fact with its worshipful attitude towards authority and its total lack of sympathy for anyone who is in any way an outsider it’s practically the antithesis of film noir.

Interestingly the police completely ignore suspects’ legal rights and rough up suspects but the movie treats this as a good thing. It means the cops are doing their jobs. They’re great guys and they do stuff like this to protect the public.

Director William Berke spent his career making B-movies. He had a reputation for churning out movies very very quickly. The job he does here is competent but uninspired, but we can be sure he brought the movie in on time and on budget.

The screenwriter was Henry Kane. Kane was also a prolific pulp novelist, his books including the rather good Frenzy of Evil.

Cop Hater does have its strengths. We really do feel the oppressive atmosphere of a heat wave. The low budget helps give the film a seedy gritty sweaty and at times sleazy feel. The acting is B-movie standard but that helps as well. There are no “star” performances. The cast is more like the ensemble cast you’d get in a TV cop show.

Overall Cop Hater is a decent crime B-movie. It certainly has an air of toughness to it. Recommended.

The MGM Limited Edition Collection made-on-demand DVD is presented open matte and the transfer is at best acceptable. There are no extras. Overall the DVD release is a bit disappointing.

The Tattooed Stranger (1950)

The Tattooed Stranger is a 1950 RKO crime B-picture and it’s a pretty low-budget affair. It’s a police procedural and it fits it into the filmed-on-location with a semi-documentary feel sub-genre made popular by The Naked City a couple of tears earlier.

A woman’s body is found slumped in a car in a park in New York. She was killed by a shotgun blast. The police don’t know the woman’s identity, they don’t know where she was killed (although they do know she wasn’t killed where they found her), they don’t know why she was killed. Even the time of death is annoyingly imprecise. But life wasn’t meant to be easy for Homicide cops and Lieutenant Corrigan (Walter Kinsella) has been a policeman long enough to know that complaining won’t solve the case. All you have to do is be absolutely meticulous about getting every shred of physical evidence that the crime scene has to offer, then you need to start waring out shoe leather and start using your brain and your experience. He knows the drill.

He is not too happy about being partnered with Detective Frank Tobin (John Miles). Tobin is one of those college boys who used to be in the Scientific Squad and they’re OK with test tubes but are they any good at real police work? But Corrigan knows there’s no point complaining about this either, and maybe the kid will turn out not to be totally useless after all.

Now you might expect that these two mismatched cops are going to clash but this movie avoids that obvious cliché. Corrigan grumbles but he’s actually easy-going, Tobin is a friendly kind of guy and seems to know his job and they’re both professionals. They’re not prima donnas. Pretty soon they’re getting along just fine.

When a guy with a knife gets into the morgue and tries slicing up the Jane Doe’s body it becomes obvious that someone is really anxious to make it hard to identify her.

The evidence collected at the crime scene holds a couple of surprises, one involving the murder method which wasn’t as straightforward as it initially appeared, and one involving seeds that had no business being there. The seeds lead Detective Tobin to the Natural History Museum where he gets some help from a very pretty young lady botanist, Mary Mahan (Patricia Barry). She’s so cute and friendly he really doesn’t care if she provides useful information or not, he’s just happy if she smiles at him. And she does eventually provide some pretty useful help. She also adds some glamour and a hint of romance to what is otherwise a very hard-edged and quite sleazy little film.

There is of course, as the title suggests, one big clue - the murder victim had a tattoo. It’s surprising just how much a tattoo can tell a cop if he knows the right questions to ask and the right people to ask.

While Corrigan and Tobin follow up leads the killer is busily covering his tracks, and doing so with ruthless efficiency.

Director Edward Montagne only made a couple of features before moving into television work. He doesn’t do anything dazzling here but he doesn’t make any obvious mistakes. Screenwriter Philip H. Reisman Jr’s career followed exactly the same trajectory. His script for The Tattooed Stranger is neatly constructed. This film captures the feel of realistic routine police work very convincingly. These cops don’t rely on brilliant flashes of insight - they know their jobs and they know that the secret is to just keep plugging away.

The acting is a bit stilted in places although Patricia Barry is quite good. The slightly stilted acting can even be seen as a plus, giving the movie more of the documentary feel that it was clearly aiming for. Look out for Jack Lord in a very small part.

The Warner Archive DVD is barebones but image quality is very good. Being a 1950 movie it was of course shot in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio so the fullframe transfer is correct.

This is a pure police procedural with no real claims to being film noir.

A very good story, good pacing, the occasional clever piece of dialogue, some effectively claustrophobic atmosphere (William O. Steiner’s cinematography is extremely good), competent directing and a well-executed climax would be enough to earn this one a recommended rating. It’s the superb location shooting, with its glimpses of life in the raw in some of the seediest parts of New York, that are more than enough to propel it into the highly recommended category. In fact I’d go so far as to say it’s a neglected classic of its type and I liked it more than The Naked City.

Union Station (1950)

Union Station’s claims to noir status rest almost entirely on its style, but if style counts for anything then this movie, and especially the exciting climactic sequences, should certainly be noir enough for most people’s tastes.

Made by Paramount in 1950, as far as content is concerned it’s essentially a police procedural with thriller elements as well.

In feel it’s classic city noir. Although much of the action takes place (as the title suggests) in Union Station in Los Angeles it could be any railway station in any city of the US. The actually setting is, as it is in any good urban film noir, Noir City USA.

The story begins when a passenger on a train notices some suspicious behaviour by some  fellow passengers. She reports the matter, and thus is Lieutenant Bill Calhoun (William Holden) introduced into the story. He’s a railway cop, he’s a cop through and through, and he takes his job seriously. This report probably means nothing but he follows it up. In fact it’s far from being nothing - he has stumbled into a major kidnapping case.



The kidnapping victim is a blind girl. Her wealthy father receives a ransom demand for $100,000. A case as big as this will obviously involve more than just the railway police, and now Inspector Donnelly (Barry Fitzgerald) enters the action. Although belonging to different generations both the young Calhoun and the veteran Donnelly are professionals and right from the start they work together smoothly as a team. Since the ransom pickup is to be made in Union Station Donnelly recognises that he will need Calhoun’s knowledge of the workings of the station.

Joyce Willecombe (Nancy Olson), the woman who made the initial report, will be involved in the ongoing investigation as well - her ability to recognise several members of the kidnapping gang is  one of the few good leads the cop have at this stage.



Kidnapping is always a uniquely unpleasant crime but it’s made even more so by the fact the the victim is blind and the head of the gang is a particularly ruthless psychopath, Joe Beacom (Lyle Bettger). Donnelly and Calhoun know that the odds are that even if the ransom is paid the victim will be killed. In fact for all they know she may already be dead, but they have to act on the assumption that she’s alive and will remain so at least until the ransom is paid. The victim’s father clings to the belief that his daughter is still alive.

With someone like Joe Beacom involved the case can be just as hazardous for the other members of the gang as it is for the victim. He’s not a man who likes to leave loose ends lying around and his usual method dealing with such loose ends is fatally violent.



The screenplay by Sydney Boehm doesn’t try to be too clever. The plot is a basic one and the quality of the movie depends on how well it’s executed. And in this case it’s executed very well indeed. With a man like Rudolph Maté in the director’s chair, a man who earned five Oscar nominations as a cinematographer, you’d expect the movie to look good and it does. The cinematographer on the film was Daniel L. Fapp and between them he and Maté have achieved the perfect noir visual signature for this film.

Barry Fitzgerald had played sensitive cops numerous times by this stage of his career and his performance is assured and sympathetic. He works well with William Holden who turns in a very solid performance as a hardboiled but dedicated cop. Jan Sterling goes close to stealing the movie as Beacom’s girlfriend. She thinks she’s as hardboiled as he is, but even she doesn’t know what a vicious piece of work he is. Lyle Bettger makes a splendid noir psychopathic villain.



The DVD from Olive Films offers no extras but an excellent transfer. This is a very neglected and very professionally done hardboiled noirish crime thriller and we can be thankful to Olive Films for making it available to us in the DVD format.

Paramount productions tended to have high production values and this movie, even though it was not a major A picture, still benefits from the studio’s classy style which it combines very well with some excellent noir touches and the result is the sort of excellent mid-range movie that the studio system was so good at delivering. Railroad settings are always effective backdrops for thrillers and this movie is highly recommended.