The Street With No Name (1948) - William Keighley 

The first thing you notice about William Keighley's Street With No Name isn't the city landscape, the forewarning shadows, the desolate skid row setting, but the horribly out of place opening music. Lionel Newman was Fox's primary music director at Fox, and one suspects that he didn't even know what this film was about when submitting credit music. It's loud rambunctious, and sounds like it should be played by a marching band in a parade, not the cool seductive bop music one would suspect with noir. The credits role in bright white backdrops. The story then begins with an FBI disclaimer almost identical to the one used in Henry Hathaway's House on 92nd Street. We see the FBI at work, and even the FBI's chief inspector Briggs is played by Lloyd Nolan who was also an FBI inspector in Hathaway's film. Things are instantly familiar, and on top of that, the film was also remade in 1955 by Samuel Fuller as House of Bamboo.

Whereas Fuller's film employed a wide aspect ratio, bright colors, and an exotic locale, Keighley is keeping his film sparse. Its in black and white, and it takes almost 20 minutes of the film before we really get the feeling that it's indeed noir. It isn't until Eugene Cordell (Mark Stevens) arrives on skid row on a "street with no name" in an annonymous city referred to as Center City, that we feel this is noir. The penny arcades, the signs with lights out, this is the settign of the lowlifes and degenerates we've come to expect in a crime film. Fuller used a similar contrast with his war ravaged Tokyo. Each film deals implicitly with the aftermath of war, in Fuller's film it is scene more as an outgrowth of postwar readjustment. How the country was left ravaged and fell prey to crime to readjust. In Keighley's film the war is a more ambiguous concept. It wasn't a hellish experience, but a training ground. The war made these men better criminals, and although they fought to protect and save their country, now they fight to rob it.

Most if not all of the Stiles gang is from the military. We know that Alex Stiles (Richard Widmark) is a veteran. He is a peculiar crime boss. A married man, who maintains little to no respect for women. He uses a screening process similar to that of the army to get his "recruits". He frames up his prospects and then uses that as a grounds to access criminal records. Cordell even calls him General at one point. Although we're left to suspect where his true feelings lie, because he carries around not an American pistol, but a Luger. He is the film's most complicated man who's main flaw is believing he's smarter than everyone else, and he nearly is. His one physical weakness seems to be his dependency on nasal sparys, which could be perhaps a symbolic cocaine addiction, or it could just show how he has one small defect. However this trait is somewhat discarded as the film progresses, and the later parts of the film generally avoid it. Stiles plays the piano, and while playing you get a small sense that he indeed does love his wife, but his machismo can't show it, especially in front of his gang. His wife (Barbara Lawrence) is the one person in the film willing to fight back. When he slaps her, she slaps back. It makes her a much stronger female than we typically see as the gangster's girlfriend. A type usually reserved for either dumb drunk blondes, or deceptively cold femme fatales.

Widmark was already being type-cast by this point in his career. He got his big break playing a thug, and the role seemed to suit him. For nearly a decade after he played a host of criminals and degenerates. Even when playing the protaganist (as in Fuller's Pickup on South Street) he was still a loser, and at least a failure in character. Here his greatest asset is his intelligence. His one golden rule of his gang is that he makes the rules and does the thinking. It goes over well with the majority of his gang, who are textbook cases of mindless thugs. They just want money and something to show off, whereas Stiles is out for something bigger. He wants power more than money, and doesn't have a very hard time parting with cash. All throughout the film he doesn't seem to have too much concern with his finances. He'll easily give money for one of his guys to get some threads, and his apartment, although nicer than the hell hole Cordell is living in isn't a luxurious palace we might expect from a crime lord. He even dishes out payoffs when unnecessary. Perhaps, like his Luger, he's more associated with the German's and power. His admiration is in being in control, being the boss. He's young, and its this quick rise that makes him arrogant and partially blind. Even when he's at his most clever (catching the switched Luger and getting its prints read) he commits his fatal flaw (being seen entering the police comissioner's house.

Fuller's film has much more life to it, but it is farther from a film noir. It is more of a yakuza film in the style of Suzuki than noir. Keighley's film although flirting with a docudrama approach early on, quickly assimilates itself into the style of noir. The warehouse basement of the gym is seen in complete blackness when Cordell enters it. The final scene in the manufacturing plant is all done in low key lighting. The small light reflects brilliantly off of all the machinery and metal. The final chase reminds one of the glorious finale of Walsh's White Heat, minus of course the explosives. Joe MacDonald, like many other photographers got his schooling in noir, he also shot The Dark Corner, Call Northside 777, and Panic in the Streets. Like Northside, this takes awhile to find its style, but by the end, this can be called nothing else but noir.

Grade C