John Ripley (Broderick Crawford) is the superintendent in charge of the criminal desk at the FBI office in Los Angeles, California. He supervises the investigations of all cases handled by the special agents under him. One of his best agents is Zach Stewart (Kenneth Tobey). Ripley assigns a new case to Zach concerning the apprehension of a criminal named Joe Walpo (Joe Bassett) who just recently killed a gas station attendant (William Schallert) and has a long record that includes interstate car hijacking, bank robbery and other murders.
Zach is already working on a case concerning car hijacking. He is currently working on trying to get a witness, Vince Angelino (Gene Reynolds), to talk but Vince is tight lipped. Zach believes that Vince accidentally got caught up in an interstate car theft ring and wants to help him, but unless he talks, there’s not much that Zach can do for him.
While going over his cases Zach gets a phone call from a woman, Kate Martell (Ruth Roman). She tells the agent that she recently got ten thousand dollars in insurance money from the death of her husband. She also says that she received a call from an extortionist that demanded the insurance money, or he would kill her young daughter. Zach visits Kate to get more information on the case.
A woman named Brenda Rollis (Suzanne Alexander) tries to call Zach saying she has information on one of his cases. Ripley takes the call and tells Zach. Both Ripley and Zach go to Brenda’s home. Before they can interview her Zach is shot dead by a hidden assailant. Ripley doesn’t know which of Zach’s cases the woman was going to talk about, so he decides he needs to solve all three to try to find out which case Brenda was referring to and subsequently solve Zach’s murder.
“Down Three Dark Streets” was released in 1954 and was directed by Arnold Laven. It is an American police procedural crime drama and a film noir. The film was based on the novel “Case File: FBI” written by husband-and-wife team Gordon Gordon and Mildred Gordon, who also wrote the screenplay.
The movie is noir, but just barely. It doesn’t have the usual stylistic techniques and touches that are normally assigned to the noir genre. It is, however, a good example of police procedurals. One could even argue that there was a slight hint of portmanteau about the film with three stories in one film. What makes it not a portmanteau is that the main story connecting them is wound around the other stories so much that they are part of the main story and not totally individual segments. This cements it more in the police procedural genre than any other.
The three for one storyline makes the film a little more interesting than just your normal crime drama. It’s not the best out there, but it does give, what would be an average movie, a little more dimension. It’s not a complex movie, but it had enough variation that it was interesting. I was also a little intrigued at the Hitchcockian element of killing off the main star, Kenneth Tobey, partway through the film.
Rumor has it J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t happy with either the original title of the film or the earlier drafts. He was concerned about criminals finding out FBI procedures and countermeasures giving criminals an advantage and avoiding capture.