Never underestimate the power of connections.  The only way I got a foot in the door which led to my current employment was through a relationship I maintained with a co-worker from over a decade, and two jobs, earlier.

The 1947 poverty row noir T-Men has U.S. Treasury Department agents Dennis O’Keefe and Alfred Ryder preparing for an undercover operation in Los Angeles by starting in Detroit.  It is there they will pound the pavement in the worst parts of town and scour the newspaper archives to build fake personas which appear to associations with various criminal organizations in the area.  Once integrated into one illegal operation through these forged credentials, an actual crime figurehead vouches for O’Keefe, giving him an in for the counterfeit ring in L.A. that is their objective. What do you know–that opening paragraph did prove to be relevant to this film.

This picture isn’t entirely a police procedural, even if it starts out that way.  And I like that type of film, where we see the complex maneuvers such agents likely had to do frequently in real life.  They also have to be able to think quickly on their feet, which will serve them well in the ever-shifting terrain that is the criminal underworld they are navigating under those false identities.

I can’t imagine being an undercover agent, and I doubt I would be any good at it.  The operation has to be especially difficult for a married man such as Ryder.  But O’Keefe says he has to be an unmarried man for this operation, so I guess he will have to faithfully serve his country by going balls deep into every floozy he meets in the course of the investigation.  Just kidding—he doesn’t have even the mildest of flirtations in the course of the runtime.

Ryder will be largely sidelined when the action moves to the west coast.  It is there O’Keefe uses a set of plates for counterfeiting $10 bills to pass himself off to Wallace Ford as a fellow forger.  This character is dubbed “The Schemer” and that is an apt nickname for this shifty and duplicitous character.  The first real scene between the two is interesting because of how mundane it is, just two guys talking shop, except one is impressed by the quality of paper used in their forgeries and the other is impressed by their plates.

The agent only found Ford because of a connection he realizes between the circulating notes and a man with a scar on his left shoulder and who frequents steam baths.  This leads to O’Keefe eventually saying to another agent a line that has to be the most hilariously suggestive thing I’ve heard in any film once it is taken out of context: “Did you ever spend 10 nights in Turkish baths looking for a man?”  Maybe his standards are too high.

I’m sure the line wasn’t meant to be funny, as there is little intended mirth to be found here.  Still, I have seen far drier films of this type, especially ones which open with a government official directly addressing the audience, as happens here.  This is real-life Treasury man Elmer Lincoln Irey, somebody who is exactly the kind of person anybody would imagine having that moniker.  He dispassionately tells us about the various agencies of the department, or “fingers” of its hand, as he puts it.  I forgot the Secret Service is one, but I don’t think I ever knew the Coast Guard was another.  By my count, he lists six of these “fingers”, so I guess the department is some sort of government agency for mutants.

And things don’t start off promising once we’ve moved on from that narration and advanced into the movie proper.  There is a weird excess of unnecessary information, such as O’Keefe having parents back in Boston.  Then there’s the scene where O’Keefe and Ryder sit on the edge of a fountain and quiz each other on their fabricated backstories, and the voiceover pointlessly tells us the name of the fountain and where it is.  We’re also told this is “the most important exam of their lives”, so I was hoping that, if one of them fails, the other is obligated to immediately drown them in that fountain.

While the picture may not have much humor to it and can be rather starchy at times, it makes up for it by being punchy–literally so.  Similar to the other output of this, and other, independent studios, it is rather violent.  One moment I was startled by is O’Keefe seemingly offering a drink to a sadistic thug played by Charles McGraw, only to suddenly drop it and then sock McGraw in the jaw when his eyes follow the glass to the floor.

T-Men is a solid, though overall average, noir.  I believe the extent a viewer will enjoy it depends upon their tolerance for police procedurals.  I would see it again, even if I can count on my fingers titles which immediately come to my mind which are superior to this one.  Heck, even if I had two six-fingered hands, like Treasury agents apparently have.

Dir: Anthony Mann

Starring Dennis O’Keefe, Mary Meade, Alfred Ryder

Watched as part of the Classic Flix blu-ray set John Alton Film Noir Collection