Walk a Crooked Mile

Packed with plot and narrated by the authoritative voice of actor Reed Hadley, Gordon Douglas’ Walk a Crooked Mile is a swiftly paced procedural noir overlaying a not-so-subtle postwar message to Americans that communism is evil. Dennis O’Keefe and Louis Hayward play FBI agent Dan O’Hara and Scotland Yard detective “Scotty” Grayson, respectively, who collaborate to investigate a communist spy ring that is somehow smuggling proprietary research from a Southern California atomic energy lab to London. As for the reds, Raymond Burr plays brawny ringleader Krebs, and Onslow Stevens plays Igor Braun, the brains of the illicit operation. A third spy is on the inside, one of five nuclear scientists at the research facility who’s sourcing and transporting the codes in highly imaginative ways. Most of the interiors (apartments, offices, a beautifully dreary basement from which the agents stake out a boarding house) are cramped, dark, and claustrophobic, which contrast the stentorian tones of Hadley’s official-sounding voice-over in an incongruous way that adds to the uneasiness.