The Captive City

In 1950 and 1951, the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce interviewed more than 600 witnesses in 14 American cities in a successful effort to expose a nationwide organized crime network that had been seizing control of economic sectors, especially through labor racketeering. Dubbed the Kefauver Committee after its chairman, Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN), the committee’s televised hearings brought national attention to organized crime’s influence in the United States, including several semi-documentary noirs like Robert Wise’s The Captive City in which Senator Kefauver provides an epilogue from his desk. Based on the true story of a crusading local journalist, the film stars John Forsythe as Jim Austin, a reporter for the local newspaper in the town of Kennington (pop. 36,000), who encounters a private investigator who’s looking into a local bookmaking racket. When the private eye ends up crushed to death in a hit and run (a brilliantly shot scene), Austin races to investigate the town’s criminal underbelly, despite growing intimidation efforts from police chief Gillette (Ray Teal), local businessman Sirak (Victor Sutherland), and other “respectable” men in the town, leading to physical brutality and even more murder. Joan Camden plays Austin’s wife Marge, and Martin Milner plays Phil Harding, a local teen who serves as Austin’s photographer and gets beat to a pulp for it. A likely inspiration for Phil Karlson’s similar The Phenix City Story (1955), the film benefits from Jerome Moross’s mood-setting score, which injects a variety of instruments and tempos to keep the pace flying along.