Former Cincinnati mayor Jerry Springer had his political career derailed when it was discovered he had used personal checks to pay prostitutes for their services. While that seemed pretty stupid of him, I also wondered why these working girls took checks as payment. First, I wonder how they knew the checks wouldn’t bounce. Even more importantly, why would one accept as means of payment for illegal activities something which leaves behind a paper trail.
Curiously, I could not stop thinking about this while watching 1958 police procedural The Case Against Brooklyn. The film concerns crooked police who are protecting an illegal gambling racket. The action mostly centers around a bookie joint in the back of a barbershop. It is there undercover cop Darren McGavin places a bet on a horse race. He pays with a personal check, which they accept, to my considerable surprise.
We have already seen this place earlier in the film, where Joe De Santis is a poor shlub who gets his I.O.U.s called in by the boss there, played by Nestor Paiva. Later, Warren Stevens and another thug will beat up De Santis, prompting the man to review the double indemnity page of his life insurance policy. Next thing you know, he’s in his truck and intentionally flying it off the road. It is obvious previously used footage is employed here, but it is pretty good and left me wondering what feature it was originally shot for.
De Santis’s widow (Margaret Hayes) comes into the life insurance money, while continuing to operate her deceased husband’s parking garage. The bad guys still want the insurance money she received. Stevens begins to insinuate to her how unfortunate it would be if an investigation discovered her husband’s death was a suicide.
Despite the obvious intentions of Stevens, Hayes seems to think he is interested in her romantically. Maybe he is, and I was a bit confused as to his character’s motivations. She believes he does nothing more than drive a truck for a laundry service. While he, indeed, does that, it is only to transport money for the gambling outfit. Seems like there’s a joke in there somewhere, what with a laundry service handling all this money.
I was equally confused by McGavin’s interest in Hayes, which seems to go beyond what is necessary for the undercover work he is doing. Perhaps he misunderstood the nature and meaning of “undercover” in this capacity, despite being married to Peggy McCay. There will be an inevitable meeting between the two women, with Stevens trying to present their relationship as something more innocent: “Your husband parks his car in my husband’s garage”. Now there’s a euphemism I haven’t heard before!
Despite the plot focusing overwhelmingly on McGavin, this really seems to Hayes’s movie. I like how they used an actress who was older than those employed in most movies of the time (hell, even of this time). Also, while she is conventionally attractive, there is nothing glamorous about her. While the film is still far from realistic in this characterization, this feels closer to reality than such pictures normally allowed.
One preposterously unrealistic moment occurs when some guy performs a musical number in a bar McGavin has brought Hayes to, and all the guy does is sing while standing next to a jukebox that is playing a record. I wondered about the logistics of this within the world of the film. Is this jerk supposed to be lip synching and, if so, did anybody ever do this in a Brooklyn bar in the 1950’s? Alternatively, if he’s actually singing, is the record somehow just the instruments and backing vocals without a lead?
At least the dialogue is fairly sharp through the runtime. There’s this amusing exchange between Stevens and an accountant while he’s dropping off bags of money: “Does the ratio of the net profits to the gross keep pace with the standing overhead, percentage wise?” “I’ll explain it to you some day.” “Never mind, I don’t even understand the question.” Then there’s the bartender who directs McGavin to the bookie joint: “Tell them Mervin the Cheerful Loser sent you. While you’re there, say hello to my wristwatch.” Then there’s a landlady’s assessment to Hayes of what had happened to McGavin: “He was exchanging compound fractures with a couple of gorillas.” Lastly, there’s the instructions to Joe Turkel (later to support such features as The Shining and Blade Runner—here looking like a taller Lou Reed) to carefully handle a telephone wired with explosives: “Be careful with that. Drop it, and you won’t need an elevator to go up to their apartment.”
The Case Against Brooklyn is better-than-average for this kind of thing. The dialogue had enough zip in it to keep me engaged even when the plotting had me stretching my disbelief until it almost snapped. It is largely a melodrama about an undercover cop with a potentially wandering eye and the conflicted widow he takes an interest in, though it is ostensibly about crooked cops on the take. Perhaps the strangest moment is when a journalist says on a television report being watched by characters in the film at one point: “The law belongs to the highest bidder.” That’s odd—the last thing I would have expected from this is a hot take on free-market capitalism.
Dir: Paul Wendkos
Starring Darren McGavin, Margaret Hayes, Warren Stevens
Watched as part of Mill Creek’s blu-ray box set Film Noir Archive Volume 3: 1957-1960