Finger Man

“Is there room in the world for people like us?” Not to be confused (or compared) with Jean-Pierre Melville’s brilliant The Finger Man (Le Doulos) released seven years later, Harold D. Schuster’s gritty, low-budget, modestly entertaining film stars everyman Frank Lovejoy as Casey Martin, an ex-con who agrees to help the police topple gangster Dutch Becker (Forrest Tucker) in order to both avoid new charges and get back at Decker for forcing Martin’s sister Lucille (Evelyn Eaton) into prostitution (never stated explicitly) and getting her hooked on booze (“Becker gets a cut of everything rotten that’s sold”). It’s a common noir premise in which an expendable man is used for a dangerous mission (“We’re giving you an opportunity to get yourself killed”), and Schuster handles it with sleazy aplomb, shooting in dreary bedrooms, dark warehouses, and shadowy streets, the kind of dark story in which disloyal prostitutes’ faces are beat up so they’re too ugly to work for anyone else.