At first glance, John Cromwell's 1951 version of Bartlett Cormack's Broadway play The Racket is just another instance of that most archetypal of crime stories: a tough-as-nails, incorruptible police captain (His Kind of Woman's Robert Mitchum) comes into town with an agenda to clean up the streets, as well as his own increasingly corrupt force.

But the twist which Cromwell brings to the old scenario is a pretty brilliant one. In The Racket, we have a second protagonist (On Dangerous Ground's Robert Ryan), a tough-as-nails, old-fashioned local ganglord who's just as frustrated by the national syndicate's looming transition from crime to "business" as Mitchum is by the forces of law and order's eagerness to accept bribes. It's a nostalgic love letter to the days when cops were cops and robbers were robbers, a rare story in which the men on both sides of the law have a single common enemy: progress.

It also happens to be much less of a textbook example of film noir than the majority of the films we've discussed so far. Despite the ingenious twists on its theme, this is a story about cops and gangsters, pure and simple. It has the attitude and even the look of a pre-noir crime drama much more than the likes of Double Indemnity.

Rather than the Expressionist labyrinths of most noir interior shots, the apartments and office buildings through which Mitchum and Ryan wander look as if their lighting scheme is just especially harsh. Most film noir characters cast shadows against the wall as black as ink, and here they barely seem to register a midrange grey. As The Racket progresses, however, and we delve more deeply into the characters' subterranean web of intrigue, both action and visuals become darker and darker, as though we've burst right through the surface of the crime picture and discovered the seamy midnight soul which lies below.

At that moment, it becomes possible to read in a new subtext for The Racket. Maybe with their story of manipulative bureaucrats with a desire to suck the blood and guts out of crime and punishment, Cromwell and screenwriters W.R. Burnett and William Wister Haines were unconsciously addressing the late '40s and early '50s dilution of film noir itself.