THE ENFORCER
(1951)
Starring Humphrey Bogart, Ted de Corsia, Zero Mostel, Everett Sloane, Roy Roberts; dir: Bretaigne Windust
Irrespective of its ‘actual events’ backstory (of which more later), The Enforcer represents a high water mark in the Warners thriller assembly-line. Bogey, for starters, is his usual ultra-reliable flinty persona (though as the crusading D.A. he far from dominates screen time) and the entire production moves forward with assured muscularity.
The backstory is the late 1940s Kefauver Senate hearings’ discovery of a nationally organised network of crime syndicates, exemplified by the killers-for-hire of ‘Murder Inc’ (under which title this film went out in non-U.S. markets, including Australia). These hearings originated the cinematic cliché of the fat, sweating mobster hunched over a huge silver microphone responding to questions with "I take the fifth", as oily lawyers whispered encouragement in their ear. Woody Allen (in Take The Money And Run, from memory) and even Scorsese (in It’s Not Just You, Murray) are among the many who have parodied this early televisual circus.
Being the first ever movie to use terminology like ‘contract’ and ‘hit’, The Enforcer is cinematic history-in-the-making, paralleling early sightings of forensic mainstays like identikit portraits (1948’s He Walked By Night) and victim profiling (1950’s Mystery Street) from the same era.
But it’s all kinda grim, and without pushing the ‘cops-as-crims’ button, it has to be said that one would no sooner be on the receiving end of Bogey’s brutal inquisitions than that of The Mob he is out to destroy. In fact, given its timing it’s not a stretch to see an unstated but incipient Cold War paranoia underpinning the script, since every direction one turns to leads to fear and threat. This is underlined with unintended humor in separate early scenes when rooms full of cops and hoods respectively each respond with stunned alarm to the ringing of a telephone in their supposedly secure sanctuaries. Noir ’s usual inadvertant humor is in short supply in The Enforcer though Ted de Corsia’s Mob tough guy Ricco raises a guffaw when he warns "I go through friends pretty quickly".
An outstanding setpiece is the cops’ fronting of Murder Inc’s inhouse undertaker, opening in a beautifully chiaroscuro tenement backlot and building to a climax of Western-like physical immediacy. Raoul Walsh’s fingerprints as uncredited co-director are all over this and many other scenes in The Enforcer. Another memorable highlight, the terse showdown finale, is widely acknowledged as his.
I can’t leave The Enforcer without noting its contribution to the expanding
sub-strata of ‘barbershop death scenes’ which here, unlike in Murder By Contract, sees the tools of its own
trade (razor, not firearms) evoke the threat, foreshadowing the reportedly very similar
scene years later in 1988’s Mississippi Burning. Men (it’s always men)
obviously find certain stock situations - standing at a public urinal is one - make them
feel quite vulnerable, and a succession of filmmakers seeking tense scenarios have
instinctively recognised how such a defenceless feeling is reliably invoked when sitting
back, wrapped up, in the reclining chair. Laurence Olivier’s Nazi dentist in Marathon
Man (1976) is a particularly spooky variant. (For women, the equivalent is less likely
to be their hairdresser’s, as reference to Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers [1988]
makes all too apparent).
- Roger Westcombe