Laikals The greatest movie ever made..!

Cathardincu Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

Hadrina The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

bsmith5552 "The Street With No Name" is another of 20th Century Fox's documentary/noire style dramas popular in the late 40s. The film uses actual FBI employees in the FBI headquarters sequences.The scene is set in "Center City" where a recent crime wave has broken out resulting in two killings. Because crimes have involved federal banks, the FBI is called in. Inspector George Briggs (Lloyd Nolan in a role he played in "The House on 92nd Street) is assigned to the case. Working with Police Chief Bernard Harmotz (Ed Begley) and Commissioner Ralph Demory (Howard Smith), they decide to plant FBI agent Gene Cordell (Mark Stevens) within the gang. Cordell assumes the identity of George Manly who with main contact Cy Gordon (John McIntire), set up shop in the skid row district of the city.Manly soon comes into contact with gang leader Alec Stiles (Richard Widmark) who controls the crime operation. After being set up as the fall guy in a heist, Manly becomes a gang member participating in the gang's plans. Stiles tells Shivvy (Donald Burka) and Matty (Joseph Pevney) to keep an eye on Manly. The gang is planning a major heist but it is halted when an inside source informs Stiles that there is an undercover cop within the organization.Stiles bides his time and knowing that Manly is the "rat" makes his move and..............................................Although Mark Stevens was a capable leading man, it is Richard Widmark who steals the film. His cold calculating Stiles reminiscent of his "Tommy Udo" portrayal in "Kiss of Death" (1947), is terrifying. He even gets to slap his wife Judy (Barbara Lawrence) around in a fit of rage. Lloyd Nolan was everybody's favorite cop in the forties. He had starred in the Michael Shayne detective series earlier in the decade.If I have a criticism, I felt that the identity of the police insider was revealed far too early. I would have kept the audience guessing a little longer.

drjgardner Why do IMDb reviewers insist on calling this film noir. There is no film noir here and if you bought it thinking it was film noir you have a right to ask for your money back from any one of the reviewers. Without going into a lecture on film noir, here's what's missing -1. There is no ambivalent good guy who makes the wrong decision which leads him down the path to destruction.2. There is no femme fatale who helps the good guy make this decision. In fact there's barely a woman in the film at all, and she certainly isn't a femme fatale.3. There is no double or triple cross, often engineered by the femme fatale.4. The film does not make use of the German expressionist, unbalanced composition type of photography.5. Neither the director nor the photographer are known for their film noir productions.6. In the end, the bad guy gets killed and the good guy succeeds.Don't let the mis-labeling of the film mislead you. That being said, it's a pretty good docudrama crime story from the late 40s with good performances.

James Hitchcock "The Street with No Name" can be seen as a follow-up to "The House on 92nd Street" from three years earlier. Both use a semi-documentary style, were loosely based on actual events and were made with the deliberate purpose of highlighting the work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. One character, FBI Inspector George A. Briggs played by Lloyd Nolan, appears in both films. "The House on 92nd Street", made in 1945 shortly after the end of hostilities, deals with the fight against Nazi espionage and subversion in wartime, whereas the later movie deals with the FBI's efforts to combat the post-war revival of what J. Edgar Hoover called "organized gangsterism".The action is set in the fictional "Center City", which could represent any major American city, although the film was actually shot in Los Angeles. It tells the story of an undercover FBI agent, Gene Cordell, who infiltrates a ruthless crime gang who have carried out a series of robberies in which two people have been killed. Cordell adopts the persona of "George Manly", a boxer and criminal, and is recruited into the gang by its leader, Alec Stiles.Seven years later the film was remade as "House of Bamboo" which, rather oddly, transferred the action to Japan although most of the main characters, and all the gangsters, remained American. The two movies had the same scriptwriter, Harry Kleiner, although they were made by different directors, William Keighley here and Samuel Fuller in the later film. Unusually for a crime drama from the fifties, Fuller made "House of Bamboo" in colour, whereas "Street with No Name" is made in the standard black-and-white film noir style. Kleiner added a major female character to "House of Bamboo" by giving Eddie (the equivalent character in that film to Cordell) a Japanese girlfriend, but the cast here are nearly all male. (Film noir tended to be a male-dominated genre, with women confined to secondary roles, although there were occasional exceptions such as "Gilda").Although "House of Bamboo" is visually attractive, I think that "Street with No Name" is the better film. The later film's exotic setting struck me as something of a gimmick, whereas here Keighley's photography of the "Skid Row" district of Center City, with its cheap flophouses, bars, amusement arcades and boxing gyms, achieves a certain gritty authenticity. There is a particularly strong performance from Richard Widmark as the dangerous, amoral Stiles. Widmark was later to appear in one of the all-time great films noirs, Fuller's New York-set "Pickup on South Street", which has a similar gritty look. I would not rate "Street with No Name" as highly as "Pickup" which has a more original storyline and a greater moral complexity; "Street with No Name", by contrast, tells a more straightforward, conventional "good guys against bad guys" tale of cops and robbers. It does, however, retain some points of interest even today. 6/10

Dalbert Pringle 1948's "The Street With No Name" is, without question, hard-hitting, well-scripted, and, most definitely, top-of-the-line Film Noir.Shot in a semi-documentary style (which was a popular format in its time), this film of crime and corruption tells the vivid story of a tough, undercover FBI agent who infiltrates a ruthless criminal gang who operate in the skid-row district of the fictional "Center City" (which clearly reminds one of NYC).Very entertaining, "The Street With No Name" is a real treat for any fan of the Film Noir genre.I really liked actor Mark Stevens in this picture. He was superb as the FBI agent, Gene Cordell.