django-1 Review of Western Pacific Agent

Western Pacific Agent (1950)

textbook example of a b-crime programmer--recommended!!

[9/10 · 15 January 2005]

There are many excellent crime programmers buried within the output of Lippert Pictures, and here is another one. Yes, it's full of clichés (perhaps I should call them "archetypes"), but it is delivered with such sincerity and style that I was caught up in the story and cared about the interesting collection of characters. Like many Lipperts of this era, the cast is superb. Mickey Knox (who has had a long and interesting career both in Europe and in the USA) is a fantastic cold-blooded killer; Kent Taylor brings his usual touch of class to the title role; Sid Melton, a Lippert regular, is added for comic relief as a near-sighted mail-order detective school graduate (!!!), Robert Lowery (in his supporting actor period, after many excellent starring roles in the 40s) as a local railroad employee who is an early victim, and a very moving performance by Morris Carnovsky (acclaimed actor and also blacklist victim) as Knox's father, who knows what his son has become yet still loves him and believes he can change. There is a genuinely shocking moment near the end of the film between Knox and Carnovsky. The "wraparound" story seen briefly at the beginning and end of the film is outrageous and would be laughed out of any Screen writing 101 class, but these filmmakers were not interested in winning Oscars; they were delivering an entertaining and exciting piece of product for the tired working people who put down their money at the third-string neighborhood and small-town theaters that booked Lippert Pictures. If you like unpretentious action films (there are no noir elements here, although Knox's portrayal of the psycho killer will appeal to many noir fans), this one really delivers the goods. I watched it twice upon getting a copy recently and marveled at how efficiently it was constructed and how professional the end product was. There's also an interesting subplot involving the hobos who ride the trains and have camps near the train tracks--their society is depicted in a sympathetic and interesting manner. It's just one way that this film, which on one level is simply a genre crime-film product, is actually a very special piece of work that is far better made than it needed to be in order to fill its niche.