John Forsythe plays a small city newspaper editor in this in this humorless depiction of corruption and vice in paranoid post WW2 America. At one point, after discovering that the chief of police (Ray Teal) is going to cave in to the mob, he's reduced to beseeching the town clergy, as if they could stop the incipient corruption taking place under their noses. With a couple of convincing murders to give the film a modicum of tension, most notable being that of private eye Clyde Nelson (Hal K Dawson) who gets backed into a dead end street and then smashed by a Buick (I believe), the picture manages to convey a diminished essence of the threat the poor town is facing. Mostly though, we're taken on a moral crusade, which in the end goes to a US Senate hearing chaired by Estes Kefauver, who tries to give the film some more weight with an epilogue in which he assures us that the real life editor is alive and a credit to his profession. Directed by Robert Wise, this is no "The Set Up", but a borderline trite piece of pro-government Hollywood propaganda which has as its main villain a Jewish insurance broker (Murray Searak played by Victor Sutherland) whose small time numbers racket gets taken over by the Mafia, who are doing the same thing in countless other endangered smallish American cities of 30,000 or so. Some effective photography and a brisk pace that goes nowhere tend to keep you watching all the way to the disappointing finish.
Review of The Captive City
