Illegal Entry

Illegal immigration occasionally showed up in select noir scenes but rarely was it the backdrop for an entire film as it is here in Frederick De Cordova’s Illegal Entry, which doesn’t shy away from the horrors of human trafficking, including the heartless dropping of dozens of human beings from planes to avoid law enforcement detection. In one of his few leading roles in noir, Howard Duff stars as pilot Bert Powers, who’s recruited by Chief Agent Dan Collins (George Brent) of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service to go undercover and infiltrate a human smuggling ring related to the recently discovered corpse of a Nazi concentration camp survivor who was killed while entering America. Having connected the corpse to the Blue Danube Café in Los Angeles, Powers’ strategy is to befriend the cafe’s owner, Anna Duvak O’Neill (Märta Torén) and her gangster associates led by Nick Gruber (Tom Tully), including accepting a lucrative job offer to fly mysterious cargo. This will lead, of course, to multiple murders. Cleverly using a newsstand owner as his messenger to and from the Feds, Powers skillfully preserves his fake identity, despite suspicions (“There’s a rat on your side”), especially from the cynical and trigger-happy Zack Richards (Paul Stewart). Cinematographer Woody Bredell does solid work, giving us occasional noir style such as the first kiss between Powers and Anna and the splendidly lit murder of Lee Sloan (Gar Moore) in the warehouse parking lot.