The Street with No Name (1948)

Too much of everything

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Why do IMDb reviewers insist on calling this film noir. There is no film noir here and if you bought it thinking it was film noir you have a right to ask for your money back from any one of the reviewers. Without going into a lecture on film noir, here's what's missing -1. There is no ambivalent good guy who makes the wrong decision which leads him down the path to destruction.2. There is no femme fatale who helps the good guy make this decision. In fact there's barely a woman in the film at all, and she certainly isn't a femme fatale.3. There is no double or triple cross, often engineered by the femme fatale.4. The film does not make use of the German expressionist, unbalanced composition type of photography.5. Neither the director nor the photographer are known for their film noir productions.6. In the end, the bad guy gets killed and the good guy succeeds.Don't let the mis-labeling of the film mislead you. That being said, it's a pretty good docudrama crime story from the late 40s with good performances.

Film Noir, which has become an almost religious term, allegorically harbored fearful and reactionary attitudes towards women's liberation, radical politics, and the public sphere in general. It implied that post- war American society was morally bankrupt and that the subjects of such a society were doomed to a collective punishment for their lawlessness, for being "led astray" from the traditional "morality" of the patriarchal order. It is thus a fatalistic and thus metaphysical world view. The crime film genre, of which this film is a fine example, those films dealing with the process of the pursuit and capture of criminals by law enforcement, was ironically more progressive and materialistic. Crime was not so much demonized as presented as a byproduct of capitalism, one that law enforcement had to contain. The process of such containment is not romanticized- it is grimy and often boring. But the system works well enough to reproduce itself. "

1948's "The Street With No Name" is, without question, hard-hitting, well-scripted, and, most definitely, top-of-the-line Film Noir.Shot in a semi-documentary style (which was a popular format in its time), this film of crime and corruption tells the vivid story of a tough, undercover FBI agent who infiltrates a ruthless criminal gang who operate in the skid-row district of the fictional "Center City" (which clearly reminds one of NYC).Very entertaining, "The Street With No Name" is a real treat for any fan of the Film Noir genre.I really liked actor Mark Stevens in this picture. He was superb as the FBI agent, Gene Cordell.

Richard Widmark's first film (Kiss of Death) got him an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe. He followed it up the next year with this film.A classic noir involving the FBI and a plant (Mark Stevens) to get inside Widmark's gang to find out who killed a housewife, and two others.Widmark was excellent as the gang leader, and ruthless when he thought he was crossed, as his wife (Barbara Lawrence) found out.The ending was very good, and provided some great twists. Of course, the FBI always gets their man.