Word: masterminder
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...sports Warren Duff's dialogue would be a credit to Mankiewiez. William Dietetle's direction shows near genius in the court room scenes, with Fd Regley, as the syndicate mastermind, radiating an injured innocence that makes Frank Costello look like a boy scout...
...film's mythical city (misleadingly introduced with a shot of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street) is run by an old-fashioned mobster (Robert Ryan), now quasi-respectable, in alliance with a mysterious mastermind of U.S. crime and corruption. The only honest public official in town is Police Captain Robert Mitchum, and though the crooks have had him shifted to a "quiet" district, all the picture's five killings take place in his bailiwick...
...Communist Tudeh (masses) Party was busy. In recent months, droves of Russian agents have been sneaking across Iran's all but unguarded northeastern border. Their mission: to stir up riots and mastermind the revolution when Iran is judged ripe to be taken over. Of the same stock and tongue as northern Iranians, the agents from Russian Turkistan are well-trained and well-heeled. The agents steer clear of the big Russian embassy on Churchill Avenue, and get their orders from the Rumanian legation...
...rates a B-plus for its efforts with a B-picture plot: the old one about the detective who bores from within a big-city racket to get the goods on the mystery man at the top. It is full of sluggings, shootings and characters with fake identities; the mastermind is the last anyone would suspect, and, at a venerably crucial moment in the final reel, the hero's girl falls into the villain's clutches...
Producer Michael Balcon (Tight Little Island, Kind Hearts and Coronets) has turned out a picture in the best tradition of satirical good humor. Alec Guinness, recently the victim of six murders in Kind Hearts, makes a thoroughly satisfactory criminal mastermind. Though remaining British to the core, he somehow achieves an almost Latin intensity in his role of a little man in happy revolt against society...