Year:  1954
Rating: 7.0

---

Remember when the FBI was respected before they were called corrupt and criminal by the President of the USA? This solid film takes us back to those days. The film is very standard issue even including a narrator to help us along and give it a serious manly tenor, but it has an excellent script that fleshes out the stories in an empathetic manner and keeps the tension on the front burner. An FBI agent is murdered in cold blood and Broderick Crawford is assigned the three cases he was working on to find out who killed him. Crawford was always great as a heavy with his build and not kind face, but this film began to change his image to a tough good guy which really took flower in the following year in the TV series Highway Patrol.


So there are three cases that he works on simultaneously and all three are excellent. In each one a female takes center stage and all three actresses do a great job. Ruth Roman as a woman being extorted, Martha Hyer as a sizzling blonde in love with a killer and Marisa Pavan as a blind woman loyal to her husband in jail. Also in the cast are Claude Akins and at the very beginning the gas attendent is a young William Schallert from The Patty Duke Show and about a zillion other TV appearances.