Black Hand

Period noirs, or noirs that take place in earlier historical periods, tend to be set in one of three distinct periods: Victorian or Edwardian London (think The Lodger, 1944), prohibition era Chicago (think Al Capone, 1959), or post-Civil War America, as in The Tall Target (1951) or the entire noir western category. An exception to this rule is Richard Thorpe’s Black Hand, the story of a young Italian-born man avenging his father’s murder during the turn-of-the-century mass immigration of Italians to New York City, a time when, as the film’s opening message informs us, there were more Italians living in New York than in Rome. Inspired by true events, the film’s title refers to an Italian-American extortion racket based in New York that preceded the mafia as we know it today. Gene Kelly plays Giovanni (“Johnny”) Columbo, who returns to New York to avenge his father’s murder by the Black Hand when he was just a child. With the assistance of police detective Louis Lorelli (J. Carrol Naish) and childhood friend — and love interest — Isabella Gomboli (Teresa Celli), Johnny faces murder attempts, bombings, and kidnapping in his efforts to track down a list of American gangsters using aliases and subject to deportation based on criminal records back in Italy. The noir aesthetic bathes every scene, studio-bound streets wet with rain and lit by lamps, the shadow of a stabbing in candlelight, etc.