Police Baffled by Contract Killers in 1951's "The Enforcer"

"The Enforcer" is a rather opaque title for a 1951 melodrama about a district attorney named Martin Ferguson, played by Humphrey Bogart, who is intent on convicting a local inventor of Murder, Inc,, Albert Mendoza, played by Everett Sloane (the crippled husband of Rita Hayworth in "The Lady from Shanghai").

The movie begins the night before that trial is to begin. Ferguson's sole witness, Rico (Ted de Corsia) is panicked. Rico had been the cool-headed intermediary who hired and managed contract killers and took contracts over the phone from Mendoza. This, we and Ferguson learn from a sweating Zero Mostel playing Big Babe Lazick, and easily manipulated (through his love for his wife and son) by Ferguson.

I have to wonder about anyone in the business of murder assembling the crew Rico did. Big Babe is unreliable. "Duke:" Malloy (John Derek knockoff Lawrence Tolan) is even less reliable, falling in love with a hit. "Philadelphia" (Jack Lambert) is out-and-out psychotic, and Vince (John Kellogg) is a coward.

Most of the movie is a flashback of the case as it came to the DA and police (Roy Roberts as Captain Frank Nelson seems to take his orders from Ferguson) with flashbacks within the flashback. There is a major twist that Ferguson figures out late in the night, or, rather, early in the morning before the trial is to begin, and that leads to a tense double chase. (And there is an aspect of this that I did not notice until after the movie was over.)

An uncredited Raoul Walsh (White Heat) was called in to reshoot some scenes, including, I'm confident, the last sequence, though perhaps also the Zero Mostel ones. (The pre-blacklisted Mostel received second billing. He had also appeared with Bogart in "Sirocco," though his most memorable early gangster role was in Elia Kazan's (1950) "Panic in the Streets." Mostel was in no movies after 1951 until the 1966 "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." He later appeared in Martin Ritt's movie about the blacklist "The Front" in 1976 with Woody Allen in the title role.)

The movie is not a noir, because it has an unambiguous hero in the crusading DA, though he is certainly manipulative. There are some very noirish sequences, including the opening part and a meeting on a foggy dock. Cinematographer went on to shoot Alfred Hitchcock classics Strangers on a Train, Dial M for Murder, North by Northwest and The Birds (only the first in black-and-white, though he also shot late-b&w movies A Patch of Blue and Once a Thief in 1965).

Bogart is tough and determined, but the showy roles are all criminals: the sweaty "Big Babe", Rico after he turns state witness (and panics), the psychotic "Philadelphia," and the swaggering lover-boy "Duke." Neither the murderers nor the puppetmaster (Sloane's Mendoza) are glamorized. Bogart looks very short (he was 5'8"), has no romantic interest in the movie. He did not play gangsters between "The Maltese Falcon" in 1941 and his penultimate movie, "The Desperate Hours" in 1955, though was usually a reluctant hero rather than the kind of all-out crusader of "The Enforcer" and "Deadline USA" the next year.

Still, Bogart was almost always interesting on screen. He smoked a lot onscreen as well as off on the way to death from lung cancer in 1957, at the age of 58.

The law enforcement officials unfamiliar with the terms "hit" and "contract" and the enterprise of murderers without motives for killing whom they kill is odd after decades of hit-man movies (including some comedies such as "The Matador" and "You Kill Me"). IMDB has 842 titles with keyword "hitman," including televisions serials "The Wire" and "The Sopranos."