No, it has nothing to do with the threequel to Dirty Harry. It is a crime thriller about a series of murders with a gritty cop as the protagonist, but that's about where the similarity ends. Its alternate title is Murder, Inc.
In an unspecified U.S. city, Assistant District Attorney Martin Ferguson (Humphrey Bogart) has encountered plenty of evidence that Albert Mendoza (Everett Sloane), presently in jail, runs a ring of hit men, but evidence that will work in court is in short supply. In particular, witnesses have a habit of dying suspiciously before they can reach the stand. With mere hours to go before the trial, Ferguson struggles to ensure that Mendoza won't walk.
More than half the movie is told in flashback. It gets peculiar when there's a flashback within the main flashback, from another man's point of view. I guess it fits the tangled web woven by killers themselves getting killed -- and sometimes their killers getting killed -- to keep silent. (They probably didn't think of this prospect when they signed on.)
Apparently, in 1951, the gang slang meanings of "hit" and "contract" were just getting started. I found it jarring that the police couldn't make sense of them at first. In fact, the filmmakers don't seem to expect the audience to have ever heard of assassins for hire. That's one reason the story feels like it came out of the '30s.
Nevertheless, that doesn't mean it shouldn't have been made when it was. Here we get the kind of cinematic choices rarely found before Citizen Kane. Heck, we get Bogart, mostly under the direction of a nobly uncredited Raoul Walsh filling in for a sick Bretaigne Windust. Along for the ride among the crooks are Zero Mostel and, at his most memorable, Ted de Corsia.
TE can't help feeling a bit dated. It doesn't make the upper half of Bogart flicks I've seen. But it has its thrills and takes less than 90 minutes, so I didn't mind the investment.
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