Semidocumentary crime films were extremely popular for a brief period in the 1940s. Film noir of a different shade, these pictures were told from the point of view of law enforcement officers going after criminal gangs and spent considerable screen time showing their procedures. Movies like The House on 92nd Street (1945), T-Men (1947), The Naked City (1948) and Call Northside 777 (1948) treated the audience to the behind-the-scenes world of the FBI and police, something that was quite novel at the time. They basically alternated between documentary-like sequences of the FBI in the field and at the lab (filmed in bright daytime lighting with a voice-of-God narration) and dramatic scenes of the story at hand (shot in an expressionistic low-key style like most noirs). Filming was done almost entirely on location for greater authenticity.

Unlike "purer" noirs which exude a sense of the world as an inherently oppressive, corrupt, sleazy, dark, hopeless place, The Street With No Name (1948) offers its audience the comfort of aligning with good FBI agents. It's no secret that good will win and order will be restored, but this does not lessen the "noir" effect of the sequences involving the criminals. The visual contrast is actually quite effective in showing the menace of the underworld.

Mark Stevens plays the FBI agent assigned to infiltrate Richard Widmark's highly organized criminal gang. Stevens drifts onto fictional Center City's skid row, falls into Widmark's gang by causing a ruckus at a boxing gym, and soon realizes that the racket involves a corrupt police source. Widmark's performance as Alec Stiles is terrific, though more restrained than his Oscar®-nominated debut one year earlier in Kiss of Death (1947). Still, he gets to slap around Barbara Lawrence in a scene that memorably shows off his viciousness. In a nice screenwriting touch that makes him neurotic and off-balance, his character is also a germaphobe who uses an inhaler and insists on keeping windows shut at all times. Stevens was a minor actor who here has one of his best roles, and John McIntire and Lloyd Nolan provide solid support.

Nolan, in fact, had played the same role of FBI Agent Briggs in The House on 92nd Street. House was a big success for Fox, and studio chief Darryl Zanuck was eager to duplicate it. Though Nolan was the only primary cast or crew member to work on both, the two films greatly resemble each other in style and substance. Director William Keighley was an experienced Warner Bros. contract director who had made the fine 1930s crime flicks 'G' Men (1935), Bullets or Ballots (1936) and Each Dawn I Die (1939), and he imbues The Street With No Name with something of a throwback style at times. Cinematographer Joe MacDonald deserves a mention for the movie's fine look. His night-time chase sequence through city streets and a ferry port is especially gorgeous, with his lighting creating a good deal of suspense and dread. The work of MacDonald and Widmark is probably the biggest reason The Street With No Name is lifted from the ordinary to the memorable.

The FBI cooperated fully with Fox, providing case histories for the development of the screenplay and field offices for location filming. "Center City" is meant to be any and every city, U.S.A., though most of the locations are in and around Los Angeles, from downtown's skid row to the docks of San Pedro and a sugar factory in Santa Ana. Only three of the sixty shooting days were spent at the Fox studio. In 1955, Sam Fuller wrote and directed a loose remake of The Street With No Name entitled House of Bamboo, which was also shot by Joe MacDonald, is even better than the original, and has also just been released in the "Fox Film Noir" line of DVDs.

The disc is not a pristine transfer. Some scenes are slightly washed out, and there are modest but noticeable scratches through much of the print. The sound is also less than crystal clear. Nonetheless, it's entirely watchable, especially for the low price. The commentary track with film noir historians Alain Silver and James Ursini is quite interesting and full of good observations about the visuals, the actors' careers, and the differences between this movie and the Sam Fuller remake. Silver and Ursini also relate the picture to earlier gangster films and to the stylistic development of film noir.

This first-rate "Fox Film Noir" DVD series will continue in September 2005 with The House on 92nd Street, Somewhere in the Night, and Kiss of Death, and in December 2005 with Where the Sidewalk Ends, No Way Out and The Dark Corner. Mark your calendars now.

For more information about The Street With No Name, visit Fox Home Entertainment. To order The Street With No Name, go to TCM Shopping.

by Jeremy Arnold