Walk a Crooked Mile (1948)

Directed by Gordon Douglas; produced by Edward Small and Grant Whytock

The murder of an FBI agent while investigating a security issue at a nuclear research facility leads his superior, Dan O’Hara (Dennis O’Keefe), to a suspected Communist espionage ring. Information is being sent overseas, bringing Scotland Yard detective Philip Grayson (Louis Hayward) to the U.S. Together the two investigators must run down the members of the gang, and their inside contact, before more vital information is lost.

A fairly routine espionage-crime drama, Walk a Crooked Mile is enlivened by the story which, after an average first half, becomes more of a whodunnit with regard to suspects. This element, combined with some good action scenes, elevates what would otherwise be a mundane picture.

O’Keefe had a busy time in the late 1940s and ‘50s, and much of it was taken up with crime movies and film noir, a number of them already reviewed on this blog. Though not a great actor, he was good, and capable of portraying a hero or a villain. Here, he is the former. Though he and Hayward do well enough in their roles, there really isn’t much for them to work with. The characters are very straightforward, not particularly interesting but involving simply due to their actions in relation to the story.

The other characters merely fill the spots assigned to them in the script, and are not given much in the way of personalities. The suspects are interchangeable, their characters, such as they are, providing nothing either in the way of motivation for their actions or clues to their possible crimes. Their nationalities seem to be of greater significance than anything else. The writer treats the suspects’ ethnicity as no guarantee of their innocence or guilt; in fact, it is used to confuse the possibilities in the viewers’ minds.

Nor is any more attention given to the criminals. The group of Communists have, as a group, rather more drive than anyone else in the movie, but, again, as individuals, they are largely anonymous. Their origins are not given, one member’s nationality being seen in a file as ‘Slavic’. However, as with their inside contact, the Communist agents, while principally foreign, include some who might be American of British ancestry. (Of the players, Raymond Burr plays one of the villains, while character actor Ray Teal is seen as a police sergeant at an early murder scene, and Gale Storm provides a voice on a recording.)

The direction is decently handled. The action scenes, as mentioned above, help the film quite a bit, a sequence in which the villains capture the heroes, and the climactic shoot-out, being highlights. For the most part, though, the direction is treated as plainly as the other aspects of the movie.

Walk a Crooked Mile is certainly not let down by any of its components, though it is uplifted really only by the script and the direction. It is an entertaining, if not original or imaginative, movie.