This is pretty good. Dick Powell is a high-level agent of the Bureau of Narcotics who tracks down opium from Shanghai to to Egypt to Cuba to New York. It's a tangled but believable tale in which he uncovers an intricate network of opium from its extraction from poppies through it refinement, shipping, and delivery in New York. It doesn't look as exotic as it sounds because except for some shots aboard a liner at sea, we only see locations through the lens of the second unit.
Dick Powell is in his hard-boiled mode here. He gets conked on the head twice. He gets conked on the head in every hard-boiled movie he's ever made. In "Murder, My Sweet," when he is conked on the head, his narration gives us Raymond Chandler's prose: "a dark pool opened up at my feet and I fell in," and we see a dark pool opening at his feet. Then we see him fall in. Here, during his two conks, there are only dissolves. They lack poetry.
It makes a hero out of Harry Anslinger, head of the narcotics bureau, and almost turns him into President-for-Life of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Well, there has to be a hero at the top, but the fact is that Anslinger was, as one critic called him, "a notorious bonehead" who put marijuana in the same class as heroin. It was all hard narcotics to Anslinger, part of a widespread plot to sap our will to fight.
It's a fascinating tale, really, given the Hollywood treatment. It opens with the murder of a hundred or so Chinese slaves being deep sixed on a heavy chain, like the slaves of yore, so it gets your attention and keeps it all the way through. Of course, this being Hollywood, we have to live with Vladimir Sokolov as a Chinese guy, trying to speak English with a Chinese accent while disguising his native Russian phones.
Dick Powell is in his hard-boiled mode here. He gets conked on the head twice. He gets conked on the head in every hard-boiled movie he's ever made. In "Murder, My Sweet," when he is conked on the head, his narration gives us Raymond Chandler's prose: "a dark pool opened up at my feet and I fell in," and we see a dark pool opening at his feet. Then we see him fall in. Here, during his two conks, there are only dissolves. They lack poetry.
It makes a hero out of Harry Anslinger, head of the narcotics bureau, and almost turns him into President-for-Life of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Well, there has to be a hero at the top, but the fact is that Anslinger was, as one critic called him, "a notorious bonehead" who put marijuana in the same class as heroin. It was all hard narcotics to Anslinger, part of a widespread plot to sap our will to fight.
It's a fascinating tale, really, given the Hollywood treatment. It opens with the murder of a hundred or so Chinese slaves being deep sixed on a heavy chain, like the slaves of yore, so it gets your attention and keeps it all the way through. Of course, this being Hollywood, we have to live with Vladimir Sokolov as a Chinese guy, trying to speak English with a Chinese accent while disguising his native Russian phones.