(92 min) Released 1947-12-15
Director: Anthony Mann
Stars: Dennis O'Keefe, Wallace Ford, Alfred Ryder, Charles McGraw
Genres: Crime | Film-Noir | Thriller
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039881/
ClassicFlix was generous to live-stream their restoration of this film today. My rating is based on whether I'd want to watch this again, and I don't. The print is beautiful, and if you want to watch a film about this topic, this is well-acted and gritty enough to convey how dangerous this line of work must be. (I wonder how much longer counterfeiting currency will be a problem, given how much we transact electronically now, and supposedly in China, phones are already the primary mode of payment, not cash or cards.)
Of interest to me: the career of Dennis O'Keefe. I've seen his name on many musicals as a dancing extra, but not spotted him yet. Looking at his 250 movie credits (1930-64), he doesn't consistently play a character with a name until a few films after Saratoga ('37, about his 183rd credit), where, according to his IMDb bio, Clark Gable helped him along. In my musicals list, I'm at the beginning of '37, and he has credits in 23 of the 127 musicals I've watched. I thought Betty Grable, Lucille Ball, Jane Wyman and Paulette Goddard had to be persistent before they got noticed; their trajectories were vertical compared to his. (BTW, he was used in non-musicals in those early years too.) He has 6 musicals where his name appears high enough on the credits to show in a non-compact, non-thumbnail view on IMDb (49 musicals total), plus 4 more (of 8) with genre Music. None of them include the film that I envision when I hear his name: Brewster's Millions ('43), which is a comedy, and has eight (8!) incarnations thus far - oh, the last one is "in development", inflated to Billions.
T-Men's production companies have about 50 and 80 credits respectively; the distributor was active only from '47 to '50, so for noir/crime aficionados, it's a miracle this film is available, much less looking like it was duped fresh off the negative. Kudos to ClassicFlix for their work here.
