Writer-director Andrew L. Stone went to work in Hollywood at age 16 and advanced through the ranks at Universal Pictures from an apprenticeship in their film laboratory to a staff slot in the props department. Paying jobs as a director came first from such Poverty Row outfits as Mayfair Pictures and Grand National but the industrious Stone established his own production company rather than wait for the phone to ring. Alternating for-hire work from the majors (in 1943 he was selected by Fox to helm the race musical Stormy Weather starring Lena Horne) with his own projects, Stone took a tip from film noir and began shooting his pictures on location, coopting the torn-from-the-headlines tone of Louis de Rochemont's The House on 92nd Street (1945). After completing Highway 301 (1950), a chronicle of Prohibition's murderous Tri-State Gang, Stone shifted focus to the Bunco Division for Confidence Girl (1952), a tale of swindlers at play in the City of Angels. Location work within the halls of the LA County Jail, and the onscreen participation of Sheriff Eugene W. Biscailuz, give Confidence Girl a Dragnet-style verisimilitude but Stone's heart belongs, for all the respect he affords law and order, to the bad guys, their intricate plotting and hair's breadth escapes from justice, and the charming trickster team of Tom Conway and Hillary Brooke. Stone's director of photography, William Clothier, later shot many films for John Ford, among them The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Donovan's Reef (1963).

By Richard Harland Smith