Walk a Crooked Mile

2/27/2019

Laundry and Liquidation. Walk a Crooked Mile is directed by Gordon Douglas and adapted to screenplay by George Bruce from a Bertram Millhauser story. It stars Louis Hayward, Dennis O'Keefe, Louise Albritton, Carl Esmond, Onslow Stevens and Raymond Burr. Music is by Paul Sawtell and cinematography by George Robinson. A Scotland Yard detective and a FBI agent investigate what looks to be a spy ring infiltrating a top secret Nuclear Physics centre. To fully get the drift you really have to understand the era when films like this were produced, a time of The HUAC and Cold War paranoia, when Hollywood itself was under scrutiny to weed out supposed communist infiltrators. Good pro Gordon Douglas directs in a semi-documentary style - complete with Reed Hadley stentorian narration - in

7/9/2022

Despite a decent effort from Louis Hayward as visiting Scotland Yard Inspector "Grayson", this is still a pretty clunky, charm-free, cold war espionage story that sees him team up with FBI counterpart "O'Hara" (Dennis O'Keefe) to investigate the smuggling of top secret formulae from a government facility to an enemy.... Their method of transferring the information is quite clever, but neither the script, nor the rather over-powering Reed Hadley narration really get this going. It has an almost documentary feel to it; the scenes are stitched together rather than fluid, and it comes across almost like a public information film about being beware of traitors in our midst (I found the culprit to be pretty obvious from the get-go), rather than to create any meaningful sense of suspense or drama