“We detune big trains.” “Wind gain bee trust.” “I better dug swans in.” “and “We urge data in bins.” These are some of the anagrams I came up with from “Bretaigne Windust”, the director credited for 1951’s The Enforcer and which I thought had to be an alias. After all, this was the blacklist era and many directors were able to work only under a pseudonym. My favorite among my guesses was “brain wedge units”, except I still had a “t” left over.
Instead, Windust was revealed to have over a dozen movie and TV credits for directing. His work here is competent, but his deft navigation of an unnecessarily convoluted storyline shows some chops.
The problems are the flashbacks, a device I am used to from noir, where it is a staple of the genre. I am even used to the majority of the runtime being in that form, but the complications come from further flashbacks within that main flashback. I swear we even go three layers deep at one point. It isn’t as hard to follow as some of Christopher Nolan’s twisty narratives, but I still frequently found myself wondering where we were chronologically at various points.
There’s enough going on without obfuscating the narrative. Humphrey Bogart’s district attorney is trying to prosecute Everett Sloane, a man who heads a murder-for-hire syndicate that is a thinly-veiled allusion to the Murder Inc. operation which was likely responsible for upwards of one thousand homicides. Sloane’s innovation in the field is the contract hit. As he explains to Ted de Corsia, most people only have a handful of connections which could possibly make them the murderer of somebody, which makes the job easy for homicide detectives. By hiring a complete unrelated person to do the job, it becomes almost impossible for police to trace those connections.
What they didn’t count on was aspiring thug Michael Tolan falling for Susan Cabot, the women he was contracted to kill. You see, as a girl, she and her father witnessed an important hit. Alas, one element of the storyline I didn’t buy is the brutal Tolan’s sudden and inexplicable passion for Cabot. One problem is we are only told by him this has happened instead of seeing any moments where their love developed. Because we’re not sold on his radical change, we also cannot buy his despair when he is forced to go through the hit just the same, and he wanders into a police station to confess.
That confession is the first moment in the overall flashback that dominates the runtime. It is at this point the film largely becomes a police procedural, which is something I enjoy, though I understand others reacting more coolly to such fare.
That investigation leads to unearthing and interrogating such low-level personnel in the organization as Zero Mostel and Jack Lambert. It was odd to see Mostel outside of comedy and even more bizarre to see him do some of the same shticks from that genre here, and in the same manner. His frantic screaming and writhing when is apprehended bordered on hilarious even in this context. Lambert, on the other hand, has a…um, distinctive face that is terrifying even when he isn’t doing anything. I was fully sold on his character being delusion, and he brings a required intensity to a role that has him start wailing on Bogie in the D.A.’s office just so he can get the protection of being jailed.
I’m not sure how safe they could have kept him, as the film begins with their failure to keep de Corsia from dying. He was in their custody on the eve of him delivering testimony in court against Sloane. One thing I found strange is this man is so scared of being killed by the gangster’s minions that he seems determined to die trying to avoid that fate. His death will occur not from a sniper’s shot, but because he falls from the ledge outside the building where he was under police protection.
His fall from that ledge, and the shots of the body on the ground below, are the kind of elements which give this an edge lacking even in many similar noirs of the time. I was surprised that survived the Production Code, when they wouldn’t even allow the film to allude in any way to the real Murder Inc. An even more surprising element is the icepicks each killer wields. We never see those in action, but just the idea of people going around performing contract hits with such implements is a bold choice. Then there are some other jarringly morbid elements, such as the legs of Tolan swaying in the cell where he has hung himself.
Still, that particular shot is capture in some solid noir photography. The entire film is actually composed of such well composed shots full of shadows. I swear fire escapes exist not for their given reason but to be captured in black and white film for productions such as this.
Also typical of the genre, the picture has some snappy dialogue, though not enough to be excessively showy. One like I especially like is from Lambert, when Mostel asks him who de Corsia gets his order from over the phone: “If you’re a good swimmer, you can ask the guy who found out. He’s at the bottom of the river.”
Organized crime would only become a bigger issue in the decades following the release of The Enforcer, though it is curiously more prescient as concerns an unrelated matter. At one point, some of the organizations guys are informed by higher-ups that the operation will now be conducted out of Kansas City. When told they will be “taken care of”, the guys try to make a run for it, knowing fully how they will be “retired”. It may be conducted differently today, but I didn’t expect a film about gangsters to foretell today’s fear of job outsourcing.
Dir: Bretaigne Windust
Starring: Humphrey Bogart, Zero Mostel, Ted de Corsia
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s blu-ray box set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XXII