The Crooked Way (1949)

Director:

Robert Florey

Writers:

Robert Monroe (radio play "No Blade Too Sharp")
Richard H. Landau (screenplay)

Release Date:

22 April 1949 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Adventure | Crime | Drama | Film-Noir

Tagline:

Savage Story of A Guy Who Tried Going Straight On...The CROOKED WAY (reissue print ad)

Plot:

War hero recovers from amnesia & is confronted by his criminal past.

Plot Keywords:

Amnesia | Hospital | Veterans Hospital | Gangster | Los Angeles

Cast

John Payne	...	Eddie Rice aka Eddie Riccardi
Sonny Tufts	...	Vince Alexander
Ellen Drew	...	Nina Martin
Rhys Williams	...	Lieutenant Joe Williams
Percy Helton	...	Petey
John Doucette	...	Sgt. Barrett
Charles Evans	...	Captain Anderson (as Charlie Evans)
Greta Granstedt	...	Hazel Downs
Raymond Largay	...	Arthur Stacey, M.D.
Harry Bronson	...	Danny
Hal Baylor	...	Coke (as Hal Fieberling)
Don Haggerty	...	Hood
Jack Overman	...	Hood
Crane Whitley	...	Doctor Kemble / Off-Screen Narrator
John Harmon	...	Kelly

Runtime:

90 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Sound System)

Certification:

USA:Approved (PCA #13659) | USA:Passed (National Board of Review) | Finland:(Banned) | Sweden:(Banned)

Filming Locations:

Los Angeles, California, USA

Company:

Benedict Bogeaus Production

Two Johns (Payne and Alton) make obscure amnesiac-veteran noir worth reviving

One measure of The Crooked Way's obscurity may be that the only copy I could track down was subtitled – in Hebrew. That obscurity is puzzling, because the movie is, if not a superior, certainly an above-average entry in the noir cycle. It boasts John Payne as its star, but before Phil Karlson groomed him into an archetypal noir protagonist. What's more, none other than John Alton was cinematographer, casting his customary shadowy spell; while he doesn't scale the dark peaks he did in collaboration with Anthony Mann, he makes French-born director Robert Florey's film look very good – very ominous – indeed.

But The Crooked Way stays eclipsed by a movie of three years earlier eerily close in theme and milieu, Somewhere in the Night, starring John Hodiak. Hodiak and Payne both play amnesiac veterans trying to reconstruct their troubling pasts in journeys through the underbelly of Los Angeles.

In The Crooked Way, Payne, having won a Silver Star but lost his memory, gets discharged from a veterans' hospital and heads `home;' that he hails from L.A. is all he knows about himself. But at Union Station, two police detectives meet him, calling him Eddie Riccardi (so far as he knows, he's Eddie Rice). Five years earlier, as it turns out, Payne worked for mob boss Sonny Tufts, whom he set up then fled to the Army; he was married to Ellen Drew, also connected to the syndicate. Ultimately, Payne finds himself hounded by the police and beaten by the mob, then framed for murder. He's running for his life and out of people he's told he can rely on....

Payne, with his brooding eyes and impassive visage, makes a more convincing vet and victim than Hodiak, but, apart from that, the story gets told conventionally. That raspy-voiced gnome Percy Helton scuttles around as one of Tufts' eye-and-ear operatives, and Drew gets some tough moments in strapless gowns (though inevitably, when her character softens, she goes bland). Still, it's a solid noir that deserves rehabilitation – if for no other reason than that it preserves Alton's precious photography.