Undercover Girl

Joseph Pevney’s aptly titled Undercover Girl is a small but under-appreciated noir that serves up plenty of grit, sleaze, and undercover intrigue. Featuring noir semi-regular Alexis Smith as the titular Christine (Chris) Miller, who agrees to collaborate with police to infiltrate the drug smuggling syndicate that killed her father, the film punches above its weight in cynicism, sending Chris into a bleak environment of addiction, corruption, domestic violence, murder, and sadism (“That’s Tully. Male nurse. Likes seeing people in pain”). Scott Brady plays police Lieutenant Michael Trent, who serves as Chris’s mentor and protector as she sneaks opportunities to report back to the precinct, while Richard Egan, still in the first year of his acting career, plays Chris’s disapproving boyfriend, Jess Faylen, an inconsequential part that easily could have been omitted. While she has limited screen time, the wonderful Gladys George (The Roaring Twenties, 1939; The Maltese Falcon, 1941) plays the bitter, bedridden Liz Crow whose identity Chris needs for her enterprise. Pevney employs a variety of visual techniques, notably deep focus, to create some interesting compositions (example: the Miller death scene with the neighborhood kids banging on the door), and Gershenson’s score is unusually ambient for the period, long notes held during tense moments to ramp up atmospherics.