The Street with No Name (1948)
Directed by William Keighley

Film Review

The Street with No Name adopts the same semi-documentary approach as The House on 92nd Street (1945), depicting the activities of the FBI in a similarly realistic vein, but this time the threat comes not from Nazi agents but from home-grown gangsters.  The bombastic introduction (which isn't helped by a piece of wanton scare-mongering signed by J. Edgar Hoover) has the unfortunate effect of making the film look like a promotional piece for the FBI - the portentous voiceover extolling the virtues of the government agency does as much to kill one's enthusiasm for the film as it can.  Having dispensed with this onerous duty (which one suspects may have been foisted on the film's makers by the FBI in return for their support), what starts out as a shameless piece of government propaganda soon becomes a hard-edged noir drama which brings a shocking new sense of reality to the old-fashioned gangster film.

In the early 1930s, a series of American gangster films that included Little Caesar (1931) and The Public Enemy (1931) had tended to glamorise gangsterism.  Once the Production Code had come into force, there was an attempt to paint organised crime in more realistic and moral colours, and films such as William Keighley's G Men (1935) made the crime-fighting federal agents the heroes.  The Street with No Name, also directed by Keighley (late in his career), goes even further in stressing the destructive influence of gangsterism and the bravery of those who put their lives on the line to combat it.  Its near-documentary style allows it to depict violence more realistically than was the norm in American crime dramas of this time, and, in doing so, the film anticipates the far grittier noir thrillers of the 1950s.  It also lays the foundation for the modern gangster film, which began, more or less, with Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973).

From a character and narrative perspective, The Street with No Name offers few surprises and hardly tries to be original.  The plot is pretty pedestrian and most of the characters are wafer-thin archetypes, with one noticeable exception.  Richard Widmark's Alec Stiles, the central villain of the piece, is a chillingly authentic mob leader - not the visibly deranged psychopath he had previously played in Kiss of Death (1947), but a horribly believable specimen of humanity for whom violent crime is a religion, not just a career choice.  It was clearly not the intention of the film's makers that we should end up rooting for Stiles, but, unattractive as Widmark makes him (in one scene he violently slaps his wife in a way that is truly sickening), we cannot help being fascinated by him.

Were it not that we had some sympathy with Widmark's monstrous character, the film's ending would be just another predictable cops and robbers shoot out, not the unbearably tense and harrowing set-piece confrontation that Keighley manages (against all expectations) to deliver.  By contrast, Mark Stevens' FBI agent Gene Cordell is just another stock good guy, colourless and uninteresting, so dull that we hardly care what becomes of him.  This is where Widmark's career began in earnest - one of cinema's most charismatic and uncompromising tough guys had given the FBI a good run for its money, now it was Hollywood's turn...

Film Synopsis

As a new wave of crime burns its way across America in the aftermath of WWII, FBI operatives are diligently engaged in combating organized gangsterism that threatens the peace and security of the nation.  Two seemingly unrelated killings in Center City set FBI investigator George A. Briggs on the trail of hoodlum Alec Stiles, who runs one of the city's most notorious gangs.  FBI undercover agent Gene Cordell is assigned to infiltrate Stiles' gang and obtain the evidence that will secure a conviction.  With the help of a forged criminal record, Cordell is able to join Stiles' gang, but after one attempt to lure the gangster boss into a trap fails Stiles soon sees through the deception...