The Films of Joseph H. Lewis

9. The Undercover Man and the Police Procedural

163 9 David J. Hogan The Undercover Man and the Police Procedural I came to borrow some books. Here’s my library card. Treasury agent Frank Warren, while seizing criminal financial ledgers Although the main preoccupation of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) is the planning and execution of an audacious heist by a variegated group of professional criminals, the film includes a significant scene with a police inspector (John McIntire) who switches on a phalanx of police radios simultaneously, so that gathered reporters will be reminded of the ceaseless challenges to a big-city police force. Dispatchers recite the latest particulars of crime and other trouble: robbery, assault, missing persons, domestic arguments. Officers in radio cars calmly acknowledge. The voices blend and overlap in a chorus of potential disaster and solutions. Huston wanted us to understand that police officers are on duty every day—all day and all night. When we need help, they are there. Only the police separate us from the perpetrators of anarchy. In this, The Asphalt Jungle suggests the “thin blue line” that documentary filmmaker Errol Morris brought to our attention a generation later. This perception of police as a narrow but broad bulwark against societal collapse is possibly the ultimate logic, and truth, of the police procedural film genre. Society is grounded in the necessity of order and systems. Methodology, whether practiced in a factory, a sales office, or a police station , is the constant that allows our world to function. Systems, rules, protocol , patience. This is procedure, this is safety, and this is where we meet Frank Warren, the highly trained Treasury agent of Joseph H. Lewis’s 1949 procedural gem, The Undercover Man. 164 David J. Hogan The March to Realism Although this chapter begins with a nod to The Asphalt Jungle, that film does not concern itself chiefly with police procedure. Jules Dassin’s 1948 classic, The Naked City, is typically cited as the initial example of the procedural subgenre, and while a strong case can be made for its importance(and will be, in this chapter), Henry Hathaway’s 1945 semidocumentary The House on 92nd Street must be acknowledged as the breakthrough picture. The narrative retells the true story of German spies based in an anonymous house in New York City during World War II, whose mission was to ferret out A-bomb secrets. Hathaway shot on the streets and in the buildings where the real drama played out, and while his protagonists are FBI agents, as opposed to the municipal cops whose presence characterizes many of the archetypal procedurals, Hathaway’s emphasis on the frequently mundane realities of fact gathering, and on refined principles of procedural conduct, certainly contributed to the development of the subgenre of which Lewis’s The Undercover Man is an important part. Despite the suggestion of investigative tedium that informs moments of The House on 92nd Street, the film merely pointed the way to true procedurals rather than fully defined them—probably because of the presumed glamour of FBI agents and the extraordinarily high stakes of their investigation . “Classic” procedurals, as we’ll see, are more closely tied to neighborhoods , small businesses, and everyday people. Henry Hathaway came back, in 1948, with another picture that predates The Undercover Man, the quasi-procedural Call Northside 777. This is a tense drama about an inherently skeptical newspaper reporter who comes to believe in the innocence of a condemned man and mounts a stepby -step investigation that he hopes will lead him to the true perpetrator of the crime. As with the FBI agents of 92nd Street, the sleek reporter (played by James Stewart) is a bit removed from viewers’ everyday experiences, so Northside is another direction marker to procedural style rather than a true example. A Pair of Key Precedents In narrative structure and tone, The Undercover Man occupies midground between Anthony Mann’s T-Men (1947) and Jules Dassin’s The Naked City, two highly significant procedurals that preceded the Lewis film into theaters . T-Men is the archetypal noir, with moody photography by preeminent noir cinematographer John Alton and a pair of professionally and emotionally linked deep-undercover Treasury agents, one of whom must The Undercover Man 165 literally stand by and watch as gangsters murder his partner. T-Men is a noir thriller overlaid with elements of the then-new police procedural, most notably in the training undertaken by the agents...