Poor Porter Hall.  He’s a mortician who just has a bit on the side (Joan Vohs) he doesn’t want his wife to know about, yet he is repeatedly arrested by Edward G. Robinson’s police force on trumped-up charges.  I could have sworn there are laws against cops doing things like this to perpetually keep somebody in jail. 

These cops may not cross as many lines as those in True Detective, but they bend the rules to the breaking point.  There’s even some things they do without a warrant which I’m pretty sure aren’t allowed.  And they engage in these activities to investigate a car theft and the murder of a cop, thwart a possible bank robbery and determine if they have a bogus Count on their hands for attempted “marriage bunco”, all in a 1953 noir titled Vice Squad.

What’s weird is the vice squad is the one department that never seems to factor into it.  Sure, there’s second-billed Paulette Goddard as a madam who Robinson gets information from, in apparent exchange for turning a blind eye to her operation.  Doesn’t that make it is the opposite of an organization which fights vice?  Also, Goddard was a very attractive woman in the couple of decades preceding this film, but here she tries and fails to be the world’s sexiest grandma.  Maybe less comically large costume jewelry would help sell this image.

Or the vice squad might apply to a brief early scene with a lineup of ladies of the night, in what instead looks like a bizarre prostitute auction.  One in the lineup corrects an officer about her age and weight and he informs her this isn’t a modelling agency.  Then he tells her to walk up and down like…she’s a model.  Then they are dismissed, and a group of gruff middle-aged men fill the line-up.  Are these prostitutes, too?  I didn’t realize L.A. was that different then.

One way L.A. is portrayed in this film differently than in most noirs is many outdoor shots don’t bother to exclude the oil derricks that apparently were all over the city back then.  I learned in my research after the film the city was built around those derricks.  To my surprise, some are still there today, though I didn’t notice any the only time I was out that way.

There are a great many decent actors in this pictures, many of whom are staples of noir.  Percy Hilton may not be a name viewers may recognize, but just hearing his voice will recall him from any of the 242 appearances he’s credited for on IMDB.  A couple of familiar faces for genre fans include Edward Binns and Adam Williams as fugitives from an attempted car robbery that ended in the death of an officer.  Jay Adler appears in the kind of low-level criminal forever down on his luck role normally filled by Elijah Cook, Jr.  A very young Lee Van Cleef appears as the world’s most continually angry cartoon weasel.

Vice Squad is lesser noir, a police procedural that follows way too many procedures.  There’s so many unrelated threads that I kept forgetting about each and was surprised when the film would circle back around to one of them again.  The weirdest thing about it is how it portrays the cops.  As this was made when the production code was in full force, it was mandatory law enforcement be portrayed in a positive light.  Given that, it appears seizure of property without a license and false arrest were acceptable measures.

Dir: Arnold Laven

Starring Edward G. Robinson, Paulette Goddard, Porter Hall

Watched on the Kino Lorber blu-ray box set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XVII