Top-drawer crook

Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947) cannot have the worst narration known to film noir. It can't even have the worst narration known to semi-documentary noir, the ripped-from-the-newsreels cultivar whose procedural ancestry renders it congenitally susceptible to public service announcements and uncredited Reed Hadley. It doesn't need to when it has a narration with such a god-awful sense of timing that eight years after the fact I can still use it as my personal low-water mark for voiceovers that should let their movies speak for themselves.

That the film affords its narrator—the inescapable Hadley—any opportunity for interruption is all the more aggravating since T-Men is really not a policier. Despite its opening flourish of institutional credentials including an establishing sweep of the National Mall, a few words from Elmer Lincoln Irey, and the literal seal of approval of the United States Department of the Treasury, its heart isn't in the technical minutiae of paper samples and hand-engraved plates and coded accounts that comprise the MacGuffins of the "Shanghai Paper Case." Of much more interest than the guaranteed exposure of the counterfeiting ring that's been passing its phony bills and revenue stamps from Detroit to Los Angeles are the less straightforward effects on the agents assigned to infiltrate this half-world of steambaths and flophouses, apothecaries and amusement piers and a recklessly tossed hotel room the last stop on this shadowiest line. The cop out in this cold isn't the mirror of the criminal, the badge is just the passport between them. Shining armor is to be left strictly at the door. Even the clean-cut introductions granted our federal moles of Dennis O'Brien and Anthony Genaro (Dennis O'Keefe and Alfred Ryder) serve mostly to set up the contrast once they have submerged themselves in the tougher, flashier personae of Vannie Harrigan and Tony Galvani, plausibly late of the rubbed-out River Gang. Flying in to D.C. from St. Louis, the veteran O'Brien shows his sense of humor when he mimes a joke about pruning the hat of the seatmate he actually lets doze unmolested on his shoulder, while the greener Genaro poignantly sets up his wife's picture to watch him while he fills out his report on the train from Indianapolis, but at their briefing they are already closing ranks like a hard-boiled double act when offered an out from the risky assignment. "Did you hear anybody say anything?" O'Brien innocently quizzes and Genaro without missing a drag on his cigarette seconds the lie: "Uh-uh." Their survival as they navigate the criminal hierarchies and rivalries obscuring the source of the ersatz currency will depend on this ability to deny anything and everything down to their own lives. As they fit themselves out with legends suitable to a couple of mid-level lowlifes hustling for the bigger time, just the uncharacteristically dressy drape of a suit points to the cost of their imposture when Genaro imagines modeling for his wife only to be reminded, "You've been divorced for reasons of duty." All the official injections of American flags and forensics and portraits of Lincoln for crying out loud can't distract from this essential alienation which so efficiently separates its heroes from their law-abiding selves. O'Brien passes a counterfeit sawbuck of his own in order to bait the notice of competitive crooks. Genaro sweats a potential informer as relentlessly as the beating he took as a buying-in. Dissolving into the darkness that eats into each hard-lit, deep-focus frame of their cover, they become as brutal and paranoid as spies in a looking-glass war, so explicitly indistinguishable from actual hoods bribing and backstabbing to their best advantage that the plethora of duplicate imagery which constantly traps its characters in reflecting superimposition feels as much like an in-joke as subtext. "A guy that used to be high up—and slipped—and is scared—is a set-up." Such loyalty as can exist in this duplicitous world has to be expert itself at double-speaking, which is where the stentorian instincts of T-Men really screw the pooch.

( Lived with me and never caught on. )

Scripted by John C. Higgins from a story by Virginia Kellogg, T-Men marked its director's first foray into the murky, permeable territory of undercover work which he would revisit more politically in Border Incident (1949) and more flamboyantly in The Black Book (1949) and formed his first showcase for the liquid, abstract, shadow-suffused photography of John Alton, with whom he would shoot five bone-budgeted noirs and a Western. Thanks to his stark and layered compositions, its characters operate in a world smogged in lime and sharpened in ink, skeletonized by low angles and top light. Ocean Park Pier floats in its net of rope lights and rain-mirrored neon. A ship at anchor yawns like a black stage out of Brecht. Everyone's faces appear to have been cast in the same steel as the coveted plates for which O'Brien has to grope beneath a porcelain sink as Moxie shaves himself in the mirror above. It's such a visually witty film, it's only fair that when it isn't cluttering itself up with ineluctably sobersided exegesis it should be very funny, as when O'Brien explains his worn-down state with the deadpan rimshot, "Did you ever spend ten nights in a Turkish bath looking for a man?" Genaro rolls himself backward across a bed to get out of it, a rare and lovely moment of levity from a man who has just been effectively intimidating while barely glancing up from his magazine. Like the sparse key lights, it draws the dark in all the more. If only the film had trusted it to stay there. This angle brought to you by my sharp backers at Patreon.