(1949)

Starring Glenn Ford, Nina Foch, James Whitmore, Barry Kelley; dir: Joseph H.Lewis

In 1949 Joseph H.Lewis’s best moments lay ahead of him (only just in the case of Gun Crazy, but still… ). Whatever Undercover Man’s intrinsic qualities, it’s this proximity to his standout flix Gun Crazy and The Big Combo that largely ensures its interest today.

What Undercover Man is is a well-machined procedural, efficiently designed and executed, with the pieces fitting together in a way that remorselessly drives the plot forward. So effectively, in fact, that we recognise many of its elements from their subsequent redeployment over the years: the cowed witnesses before a police line-up, the shyster lawyer springing his gunsels minutes after their arrest, etc.

But aspects of Undercover Man are so original it still makes us uncomfortable. There’s something unusually raw about the busted police captain, now a humble sergeant – once a ‘good cop’ who, when threatened by the Mob, protected his family first at great cost to his own (larger, societal) integrity. This character’s diminution is presented as an unstable compromise only reconciled by his suicide – tellingly by the instrument of the (sole) honest cop’s revolver.

As Myron Meisel says in Kings of The Bs, "action in the film is always propounded within the context of family bonds". Lewis deliberately defuses assertions of anti-Italian racism by locating the impulse for defeating the Mob in the words and actions of an Italian family. He subtly summarises this in the courtroom scene where he tracks along the faces at the good guys’ table to link three generations of Italian women with Treasury agent Ford and State’s witness Leo Penn (yes, Sean’s dad!).

Such care is necessary given that the (barely glimpsed) nemesis in the film, ‘The Big Fellow’, is obviously Al Capone manqué. Such obfuscation was necessitated by a J.Edgar Hoover-driven edict in the Production Code that forbade biopics of actual crims (a stricture which lasted until the late 50s, when films like The Bonnie Parker Story broke free).

Amazingly then, Undercover Man is unflinching in portraying the police force and town administration’s near total corruption, down to the honest cop’s apology when the Mob lawyer (Barry Kelley) snarls "do you want to keep your job?", a backdown as craven (and unconvincing!) as anything Homer Simpson ever came up with. There’s a characteristic touch of Lewis sadism too, when Ford threatens Leo Penn with newspaper exposure which would suggest he's a stoolie despite "revealing nothing to police" - both know this will sign Penn’s death warrant.

Undercover Man does shift gear uneasily in its second half away from the tightly drilled mechanics of detection to an odd mix of bucolic idyll and our hero’s battle with his conscience. This is between his larger societal duty of law enforcement and a ‘selfish’ desire to protect his loved one. When Ford, predictably, opts for society’s interests over his family’s, he ensures that he is spared the fate which befell the fallen police captain seen earlier.

Like Lewis’s The Big Combo, Undercover Man has nowhere near the sustained brilliance of Gun Crazy, his undoubted masterpiece, nor despite its schematic similarities is this another T-Men. However, although it’s an unprepossessing film, Undercover Man provides solid genre pleasures and a few special bonuses: the renowned Little Italy pursuit, the back alley auto-cide plus the highlights mentioned above.