TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 a.m. and 10 a.m. ET is The Captive City (1952), Directed by One of the Most Under-Rated Movie-Makers Ever, Robert Wise, Starring John Forsythe, and Featuring Joan Camden, Harold J. Kennedy, Hal K. Dawson, and One of the Most Under-Rated Actors Ever!

By David in TN
Friday, January 17, 2020 at 4:17:00 P.M. EST

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at 12:15 a.m. ET and 10 a.m. ET is The Captive City (1952), directed by Robert Wise, and featuring John Forsythe, Joan Camden, Harold J. Kennedy, Ray Teal and Hal K. Dawson.

Film Noir Guide: “John Forsythe (of TV’s Bachelor Father and Dynasty) plays a crusading newspaper editor battling the Mafia in his small town. When a terrified private eye (Dawson) contacts Forsythe and tells him he’s being harassed by the police and followed by a car with out-of-state plates, Forsythe doesn’t pay much attention... until the man turns up dead, a hit-and-run victim.

“Forsythe finally decides to investigate but finds the townsfolk strangely uncooperative. He’s resisted at every turn by the police chief (Teal), the town’s business and religious leaders and even his partner (Kennedy) at the newspaper. It isn’t long before Forsythe and his wife (Camden) notice a car with out-of-state plates following them, too.

“Forsythe gives an enjoyable, low-key performance, but the film is slow moving and lacks suspense. Senator Estes Kefauver (see Mad at the World), the chairman of the Senate Crime investigating Committee, makes an appearance to warn the American public of the dangers of ignoring seemingly victimless crimes such as gambling. United Artist was careful to point out that Kefauver’s salary for his part in the film went to charity.”

David in TN: Estes Kefauver was our Tennessee Senator from his 1948 election to his death in 1963. Kefauver ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1952. He beat incumbent Harry Truman in the New Hampshire primary, and Truman announced he would not run for re-election. At the 1952 Convention, Truman came to Chicago and told the delegates to nominate Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson, which they did after several ballots.

Today, gambling has been pretty much legalized. The public never has cared that much (post-World War II especially) about organized crime, as they don’t usually carry out murderous home invasions, kidnap-murders of innocent civilians, rape-murders of young women, etc. But politicians have long made reputations on “fighting organized crime.”

N.S.: Robert Wise never figures on critics’ greatest lists, because he lacked a “signature.” No, but all he did, after cutting Kane (not sugar, but Citizen Kane, 1941) was make a string of entertaining pictures, classics, and masterpieces in several different genres, before suffering from artistic senility in his late fifties. (I’m only listing pictures I’ve actually seen).

Horror: Curse of the Cat-People (1944); The Body Snatcher (1945); The House on Telegraph Hill (1951);

Science fiction: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951);

Boxing: The Set-Up (1949); Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956);

Western: Tribute to a Bad Man (1956);

Crime/liberal propaganda: I Want to Live (1958);

War/communist propaganda: Run Silent, Run Deep (1958);

Heist/liberal propaganda: Odds against Tomorrow (1959);

Period piece/epic: The Sand Pebbles (1966) (Allegedly liberal propaganda, but I don’t believe it, for reasons I’ll give elsewhere.);

Musical/liberal/gay propaganda: West Side Story (1961); and

Musical/Happy Nazis: The Sound of Music (1965).

Ray Teal was one of the most prominent members of the “I know the face, but not the name Club.”

Teal, who started out as a jazz musician, put together a resume of 520 (or was it a mere 519?) TV and movie credits. (Never mind IMDB; you could appear on the same show 200 times, and it would still count as one credit. I count each appearance as a credit.)
Two of his performances stand out.

In The Best Years of Our Lives, Teal has only one scene, but it’s a doozy. (I was going to call it “pivotal,” but what scene isn’t in that picture of knockout scene after knockout scene?)

(The scene in the picture, as written by Robert E. Sherwood, was not in the 268-page MacKinlay Kantor poem it was based on.)

Two of the three protagonists are at the big, corporate, chain drugstore. Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) who, before the war was a soda jerk who, during the war was a decorated bombardier captain in the Army Air Corps who “killed a hundred men” and who now, as returning hero, has been demoted back to soda jerk, working under the shirker who used to work under him! Homer Parrish, who before the war was a star athlete, served as a sailor who lost both hands in a Jap sub attack, and now makes do with hooks, is visiting Fred.

A middle-aged man reading a newspaper orders a sandwich, looks downcast at Homer’s hooks, and tells him he fought the wrong side. He pokes the (apparently Nazi) newspaper, and insists that he’s speaking “just the facts.”

This so enrages Homer that he yanks the American flag emblem out of the man’s lapel. Fred leaps over the glass counter, slugs the customer, who falls into the counter, shattering it.

The shirker supervisor triumphantly approaches Fred, who hands him his apron, saying, “I know. The customer’s always right, so I’m fired. But not this customer.”


Teal’s other role had much more screen time. In Judgment at Nuremburg, he played an old American judge who had been conscripted to serve on a three-man tribunal trying low-level Nazi war criminals in a bench trial.

The main figure is Spencer Tracy, a Maine jurist who was pulled out of retirement (Spence was only 60 when he made Judgment, but looked to be in his 70s, without any help from the makeup man) to be the chief judge, and to serve as producer-director Stanley Kramer’s alter ego.
Teal’s character notes that the defendants are charged with having committed crimes that weren’t crimes, because they were merely following the statutes on the books. Tracy responds (paraphrase), “You had better make that argument again, and be very careful.”

We’re supposed to cheer on Spence, because, he’s Spence, but he’s all wrong. Teal’s character was absolutely right.

In those days, Spencer Tracy was so good, he was dangerous. He was like Fred Astaire in the latter’s prime, the way he made acting look easy. Abby Mann wrote some triumphalist speeches for Tracy that have caused the picture to fall in my esteem, though it’s still on my Top 100 list (it was once as high as 11th). I don’t know how thoughtful viewers reacted then, or react now.

I’ll bet Kramer chose Teal for the role, based on his playing of the Nazi in BYOL.

Ray Teal was the ultimate role player, who’d come off the bench to throw a key block to spring a back to make the game-winning touchdown.

Another prominent member of the “I know the face, but not the name Club” was Elisha Cook Jr. (The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Big Sleep (1946), Shane 1953, etc.). I know some of you were thinking of him, when I spoke of the “club,” so I just wanted you to know that I was thinking of him, too. I’ll get into him some other time.