The Enforcer (1951)

Director:

Bretaigne Windust

Writer:

Martin Rackin (story)

Release Date:

24 February 1951 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Crime | Film-Noir

Tagline:

"If you're smart you'll come down - if you're dumb you'll be dead..." (one-sheet poster)

Plot:

A crusading district attorney finally gets a chance to prosecute the organizer and boss of Murder Inc.

Plot Keywords:

Flashback | Italian American | Eye Witness | Nonlinear Timeline | Suicide By Hanging

Cast

Humphrey Bogart	...	Dist. Atty. Martin Ferguson
Zero Mostel	...	Big Babe Lazich
Ted de Corsia	...	Joseph Rico (as Ted De Corsia)
Everett Sloane	...	Albert Mendoza
Roy Roberts	...	Capt. Frank Nelson
Michael Tolan	...	James (Duke) Malloy (as Lawrence Tolan)
King Donovan	...	Sgt. Whitlow
Bob Steele	...	Herman (as Robert Steele)
Adelaide Klein	...	Olga Kirshen
Don Beddoe	...	Thomas O'Hara
Tito Vuolo	...	Tony Vetto
John Kellogg	...	Vince
Jack Lambert	...	Philadelphia Tom Zaca

Also Known As:

Murder, Inc. (UK)

Runtime:

87 min | 85 min (TCM print)

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (RCA Victor System)

Certification:

West Germany:16 (nf) | Canada:PG (Ontario) | Australia:PG | Norway:16 (original rating) | Sweden:(Banned) (1951-1960) | Sweden:15 (re-rating) | UK:18 | USA:Approved (PCA #14747) | Finland:(Banned)

Company:

United States Pictures

Trivia:

After several days of filming, director Bretaigne Windust fell seriously ill and was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Humphrey Bogart asked his old friend, director Raoul Walsh, to come in and shoot the picture until Windust recovered. Unfortunately, Windust was more seriously ill than most realized, and his recovery took several months, during which Walsh finished the film. However, Walsh refused to take screen credit for it, saying that the picture was Windust's big break and he wasn't going to take it away from him.

Quotes:

Capt. Frank Nelson: What's wrong with the law that we can't touch him
[Mendoza, boss of murder ring]
Capt. Frank Nelson: ? Oh, I know, our kind of laws are designed to protect the innocent. It's not enough we know a man is guilty - we have to prove it.
D.A. Martin Ferguson: Ever have a tune running through your head and you can't remember the words?
Capt. Frank Nelson: What are you getting at?
D.A. Martin Ferguson: How many people did we speak to on this case?
Capt. Frank Nelson: Oh, I'd hate to remember.
D.A. Martin Ferguson: How many pages of testimony do you suppose we took?
Capt. Frank Nelson: Enough to fill a nice-sized room!
D.A. Martin Ferguson: Heh, somewhere's in that testimony somebody said something that stuck in my brain. It got lost in the shuffle, because we didn't need it - we got Rico! But now...
[...]

Movie Connections:

Featured in Bullets Over Hollywood (2005) (TV)

A Neat Little "How He Gets Caught" Plot

This was one of the last twenty films of Bogart's career. Having finally achieved stardom with HIGH SIERRA (also directed by Raoul Walsh) and THE MALTESE FALCON, Bogie (by 1950) was in a position to pick and choose what films he would make. Artistically his peak was probably THE TREASURE OF SIERRA MADRES in 1948, but his Oscar winning film, THE AFRICAN QUEEN, was in 1951, and he still had IN A LONELY PLACE and THE CAINE MUTINY in his future. Here he returns to Walsh as his director, and leads a bunch of fellow character actors in a nice example of the thriller that is based on the error that undos the evil criminal - an inverted detective story device that is best seen today in the television series of COLUMBO.

It is a first rate bunch of character players, led by a superb quartet of evil: Everett Sloan, Ted de Corsia, Jack Lambert, and Bob Steele. Sloan played villains before (he is that nasty customer, Arthur Bannister the great attorney, in Orson Welles's THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI), but his performance shows what he could achieve with so little. He only appears in two scenes in the film (one when he invents "Murder, Inc." before de Corsia's astounded eyes; the other when he is alternately arrogant and panic-stricken in the prison cell he resides in). A normal looking, even dapper little man, he is a human monster. De Corsia is wonderful as the "Abe Reles" character, whose fear of Sloan/"Mendoza" leads to his death (historically, Reles probably was thrown out of the window of his hotel by policemen who were bribed to do so, although they tied a set of sheets together to make it look like Reles was killed in a stupid attempt at escaping). Listen to the way he describes the unfortunate Tony Vetto, the cab driver who witnessed Mendoza's first murder, by describing his face - a combination of disgust and dismissal in the discription as de Corsia reads the line. Lambert is a forgotten character actor, who played many hoods in his films (he could, like De Corsia and Steele, look threatening very easily). But he usually has above-average intelligence(watch him in THE KILLERS - he's the first of Albert Dekker's gang who figures out that the double cross may not be from Burt Lancaster). Here he tries to keep incarcerated as protection from Sloan and De Corsia, only to find he has to cooperate with Bogart to be safely imprisoned. Steele was a cowboy film star, but he appeared with Bogie twice as sadistic gunmen. Here he is Herman, one of the torpedoes of Mendoza's gang. But Herman could be a cousin of "Canino", the creep who works for Eddie Geiger in THE BIG SLEEP, and who poisons a (for once) poignantly tragic Elisha Cook Jr. Steele was a good actor, but most people who don't recall his heyday as a cowboy star remember him only as the garrulous Sergeant Dobbs in television's "F-TROOP" ["There I was at the Alamo with Davy Crockett..."].

The most interesting casting of all is Zero Mostel, as Babe, the hapless, fat thug who gets in over his head (but does survive, for all that). Mostel was in several good films in the early 1950s (PANIC IN THE CITY, with Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, and Paul Douglas is another example). He even was in two films with Bogart (this one and SIROCCO, where he played a slightly more evil character). But the black list ended his budding movie career, and forced him into nightclub work, and back to the legitimate theatre - to ULYSSES IN NIGHTOWN, RHINOCEROS, A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, and FIDDLER ON THE ROOF. He ended being one of the great stars of Broadway history, with two first rate performances captured on film: FUNNY THING HAPPENED.... [as Pseudolus], and THE PRODUCERS [as Max Bialystok]. One can regret the unfairness of the blacklist, and the lost film performances, but then he might have remained a character actor in supporting parts, and not become a star. It is a point for all of us to think about.