Beneath his pretty exterior lurked … Cthulhu! Wait, that can’t be right, the Big C didn’t like that brand of cigarette. Must be some other Elderly God.
Force of Evil (1948) looks into the moral dilemmas of a pair of brothers, the younger brother, Joe Morse, a lawyer working for the mob, a mob looking to take over the bookie trade, and the older brother, Leo, runs, of course, a bookie operation.
The former is angling for a piece of the action, while the latter is simply trying to offer an honest service. Indeed, some of his employees are what we today call challenged, working for Leo despite their various handicaps, and sometimes Leo makes sure they get home after work.
But the mob is not interested in honesty, and Joe discovers that the weight he swings is insufficient to his ends of financial wealth and familial integrity.
And don’t forget Leo’s assistant, Doris, to whom Joe takes a shine. Can she possibly survive the association?
Yep, this is noir, a story of bad decisions, of poor lifestyle practices, of shabby desire taking precedence over the duties of adulthood – and the arrogance that goes along with it all. This may not be the darkest of noir, but it’s definitely in the genre: Joe finding the organization considers him a tail, not the body, a hammer rather than the brain directing it.
And all brought on by his desire for financial rewards rather than the societal rewards that Leo seeks. And that’s where there’s a crack in this plot, because bookie operations are commonly criminal, ugly operations; that decent Leo would get involved is a little hard to credit. Maybe I’m prejudiced against bookies, or maybe I don’t understand the history of bookies, but I found it a little disturbing that the good guy was actually just another criminal.
But this may be a minor blemish, depending on the audience member. It’s not a bad 1940s movie at all, with excellent acting and cinematography; in fact, there’s nothing wrong with the technical aspects.
It’s down, dirty, and discouraging as humanity tussles with itself. And, maybe, loses.
