The Turning Point (1952)

 The German expat William Dieterle directed the 1952 film noir, The Turning Point.  The picture is efficiently made and reasonably exciting.  It exemplifies craftsmanlike Hollywood film-making:  careful plotting, excellent pithy dialogue, a serviceable moral and ethical perspective, and effective acting.  The film isn't particularly memorable -- indeed, most film noir are similar to one another and fungible:  one plot and one set of characters can be substituted for another without doing much harm to the sturdy premises of these films.  The Turning Point is a noir in the genre of the crusading District Attorney determined to purge corruption (signified by organized crime) from his town -- it's part of group of films that include Fritz Lang's much more indelible The Big Heat and Phil Kaufman's The Phenix City Story.  

A straight-arrow DA named Conroy(Edmund O'Brien) is conducting hearings to expose a criminal syndicate headquartered at a local trucking firm.  These are called the "Conroy Hearings", apparently, a reference to the actual Kefauver Hearings on organized crime that were roughly contemporaneous with the production of this film.  Conroy enlists the support of a cynical journalist, McKibben, played by William Holden.  McKibben, in the first of several stylized and ornate speeches, suggests that corruption is endemic to the human condition (an echo of Willie Stark in All the King's Men) and that Conroy is biting off more than he can chew.  McKibben does some investigation of his own and discovers to his horror that Conroy's father, an old copper, is working for the bad guys. (A scene in which the elder Conroy explains how he became a servant of organized crime is also very well-written and moving:  the old cop betrayed his principles for cash so that he could send his son to law school) The gangsters suspect that the corrupt cop is going to betray them and so they arrange to have him gunned down, killing, as well, the gunsel who lured the policeman into the ambush and shot him down.  The killings were witnessed by the gunsel's moll who approaches McKibban reluctantly offering to be a witness against the mob.  The nasty trucker-gangster sends his men to kill the moll (she's Mexican and her name is Carmelina).  McKibben protects her.  By this times, he's having an affair with Conroy's betrothed, a cool, businesslike dame (Alexis Smith) who seems to have gone to some expensive college out East -- the film takes place in downtown LA and features great location work in the old Bunker Hill neighborhood around the funicular now called "Angel's Flight." McKibban breaks it to Conway that his dad was a factotum for the mob.  The killers draw McKibban into an ambush at the Olympic Arena, a squalid-looking boxing venue.  McKibban is fatally wounded and Conroy and his cops arrive at the scene too late to save his buddy, but in time to shoot down the gunman.  Conroy's men raid the trucking headquarters and haul off the kingpin of the gang as well as most of his men -- a few perish in futile, if showy, gunfights.  McKibban dies in the arms of Conroy's fiancee, thus, solving the problem posed by the meretricious relationship between the journalist and the girl -- adultery or quasi-adultery isn't rewarded.  The dame is left with regrets, McKibban dies nobly, and Conway walks off sadder but wiser.  He pronounces the movie's moral in its last line:  "Sometimes someone has to pay an exorbitant price for the majesty of the law" -- this is a reprise of lines earlier in the film.

The movie has many minor and incidental pleasures.  Caroline Jones is very funny as the prostitute-mistress of one of gangsters -- she has a little scene but makes her mark; she would later be Morticia in The Addams Family on TV.  The scenes in which William Holden is stalked by a baby-faced gunman at the boxing match (the bad guy is hiding high above among the roof-supporting steel-girders -- every time, he gets Holden in his sights, something exciting happens in the fight and the crowd stands blocking his shot -- is very exciting.  Holden breathlessly whispers to Conroy's girl:  "There's a gun on me." as he flees through the exiting crowd. And there's a great scene in which Holden fights off two bad guys with a table flung in their faces while Carmelina flees out the backdoor of a saloon where she has been hiding.  The saloon's back alley opens onto an enormous spiral staircase that coils up the side of one of the buildings on Bunker Hill.  McKibban (Holden) runs up the staircase shouting out the girl's name, an extended shot that's completely pointless (the girl just vanishes), but highlights the fantastic location and has an odd surrealistic edge:  the journalist just keeps climbing and climbing on the narrow spiral steps until he reaches the top of the building -- but since the structure is embedded in the side of a hill, this is just a nondescript corridor that is level with the streets running along the top of hill.  This is really wonderful, the stuff of dreams.