The Mob is a deeply satisfying crime drama - and I’m okay with considering it a film noir actually - heightened by a fine lead performance from Broderick Crawford. It features a nifty cast of familiar faces, including Richard Kiley, Ernest Borgnine, and, in a bit role with one line, Charles Bronson. There are ample twists and developments which manage to generally establish a heightened, suspenseful atmosphere befitting what we expect from noir. Director Robert Parrish, here making his second feature after the even stronger (and not yet available) Cry Danger, offers little stylistic flourish but he and cinematographer Joseph Walker each do their part in creating the right mood, despite the obvious lack of shooting on location and other budgetary restrictions.

The film opens in that most noir of climates - dark and rainy. Crawford is an off-duty cop in a pawn shop, trying to buy his girl a nice ring at a discount. He exits and comes upon a fresh shooting in the street. The man with the gun identifies himself as a police lieutenant who’s just brought down a cop killer. Crawford’s character Damico gets a look at his badge and sends him into a diner to call for a squad car. Trouble is, the man goes in the front door and out the back because he’s not really a cop. Instead, he’s Blackie Clegg, the guy who killed both the man in the street and the dead police officer, and Damico has just let him go free. The punishment, officially, is a suspension. The reality is that Damico is assigned to work undercover at the docks in order to get closer to Clegg, who’s known to run things from afar. Hardly anyone, including Damico’s girlfriend, can know about the assignment.

Officer John Damico becomes Tim Flynn, a dock worker from New Orleans who’s had to come up north while some details from his past cool down. He meets all sorts of characters in his new locale. A fellow laborer named Clancy (Richard Kiley) befriends Flynn, but it’s the higher-ups like Castro (Ernest Borgnine), and his lackey Gunner (played by Neville Brand), who end up coloring his experience the most. The twists this film takes are entirely effective and compelling, so much so that plot descriptions become increasingly less valuable than usual. The whole thing churns along so very nicely, and it’s great to see Crawford essentially playing both his usual gruff exterior in the form of Flynn and a more subdued and quick cat in Damico. The role would have been a reward of sorts from Columbia for his Oscar-winning turn in the studio’s All the King’s Men a couple of years earlier. Crawford was always more versatile than he was allowed to show on screen, and this is a shining example of his ability to carry, forcefully so, a film pretty much on his own.

The director of The Mob, Robert Parrish, might not have achieved great distinction for the dozen and a half or so films he was credited with making, but both this feature and his only previous one Cry Danger are deserving of favorable recognition. Oddly enough, both films find a singular protagonist who is an outsider trying to coalesce in an ostensibly foreign environment. The set-up is a noir staple but the pictures, both with screenplays credited to William Bowers, make good use of being on the fringe. Dick Powell in Cry Danger and Crawford here are both guys made to be on the outside looking in, with a task of sorts to accomplish in order to find some kind of normal existence in their lives. Indeed, the two films are surprisingly similar when considered in tandem and both are in need of some fair re-evaluation.

The title of The Mob might be holding it back a little. I’d resisted the movie for a little while, assuming (wrongly) that it was more heavily built around organized crime, like so many middling pictures with a docudrama intensity were during this decade. These films tend to get bogged down in the gangsterism element, to the detriment of the overall narrative. To my pleasant surprise, The Mob is a genuinely focused effort that uses Crawford’s undercover cop routine as a bridge between exposing the unfair corruption facing the dock workers, later to be part of On the Waterfront, and the more general dangers that befall the guys on the police force who are clean. Had The Mob been made twenty or thirty years later you could easily picture Sidney Lumet behind the camera. That version might not have been half bad either, but it seems doubtful that any latter incarnation would have been quite this tight and to the point.

(The Mob has been released on DVD as part of the Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics III set, which itself was issued under the TCM Vault Collection banner. The 1.33:1 transfer, even coming from a single-layered disc, is nigh-on impeccable for this title.)