The FBI Story (1959)

The FBI Storycan be a hard film to like, but it’s a movie I’ve had a nagging affection for since I was a kid. Directed and produced by Mervyn Le Roy, one of Hollywood’s genuine stalwarts, it was made with the cooperation and close, interested supervision – read, the shortest and tightest of propagandist leashes – of J. Edgar Hoover, who reportedly even assembled one of his infamous dirt files on Le Roy to make sure he walked the straight and narrow despite their being friends. The FBI Story nonetheless has an impressive and encompassing sweep, offering a compressed biography of American modernity from a specific point of view as well as a miniature recounting of genre movie lore. The overt project is telling the story of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s rise from an underfunded and barely relevant organisation to a complex and cutting edge instrument of law enforcement. James Stewart’s everyman persona of superficially befuddled but quietly capable strength is deftly exploited in casting him as a fictionalised protagonist, John ‘Chip’ Hardesty, who starts off as a frustrated young bureau agent in Knoxville and finishes up an old and respected hand who lectures young recruits about the Bureau’s evolution, illustrated via a succession of flashback vignettes depicting various cases. This interesting if necessarily episodic structure is counterpointed with Chip’s marriage to librarian Lucy Ann (Vera Miles), and his generally happy if often trying and even tragic family life. 

Nostalgic, folkloric fascination for the heady days of the Jazz Age with all its seedy glamour and the lingering fame of the era’s gangland legends flared up in the late 1950s, resulting in the likes of backward-glancing movies like Baby Face Nelson (1958) and the TV series The Untouchables. This revival found a certain synergy with 1950s youth culture with all its fond self-imagining as wild and edgy and the paranoia of elders who imagined a new age of barbarism, and when the gangster age nostalgia reached something of an apogee with Bonnie and Clyde (1967) nearly a decade later, it bespoke in many regards a near-complete reversal of viewpoint and sympathy to The FBI Story. The FBI Storyoffered plenty of bang for the bygone buck in any event, as its narrative encompasses just about all the headliner hoodlum acts of the late 1920s and ‘30s, including depictions of Baby Face Nelson (William Phipps), John Dillinger (Scott Peters), Ma Baker (Jane Crowley), Alvin Karpus (George Khoury), Machine Gun Kelly (Stacy Keach Sr), and Pretty Boy Floyd (Bob Peterson). The film opens however with a contemporary case, depicting the destruction of a passenger plane by a planted bomb, which the FBI sifts methodically and eventually pins on slimy fraudster Jack Graham (Nick Adams), who staged the bombing to collect his mother’s life insurance.

The emphasis on forensic method, which had been touched on before in movies like He Walked By Night (1948) and White Heat(1949) but only as a side aspect of crime fighting, here sees such technique moving to the centre of detection. Moreover, the film’s general presentation of the FBI as a dynamic locus for modern detection approaches, with asides looking at training methods and the like, were bound to give birth to everything from TV franchises like CSI and Silent Witness to fare like The X-Files and Thomas Harris’ serial killer tales. Adams offers a brief but memorable portrait in sweaty, slimy perfidy disguised as suburban banality: the killer who, once nabbed, tells his foes: “In case I get any mail you can send it to Canyon City Prison for the next month or so -- after that you can send it to hell!” Hardesty’s account contrasts the modern organisation with an initial portrait of a rundown and dissolute appendage of the US government, represented by Chip’s former field office chief Harry Dakins (Parley Baer), a feckless grumbler who jumps ship the moment Hoover takes over and proposes galvanising the organisation into something more resolute and effectual. Chip and his pal, fellow agent Sam Crandall (Murray Hamilton), are inspired to stick with Hoover, although Chip was planning to quit and become a lawyer at Lucy’s insistence. 

For Le Roy, The FBI Story might have felt like an act of personal retrospective as well as cultural and civic, as he’d made his name as a director on movies from the Depression age like Little Caesar (1930), I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang(1933), and They Won’t Forget (1937), movies where he established a tough and gamy brand blending reportage and gritty drama rooted in a realistic milieu. Le Roy was the kind of director canny when it came to the kind of attention-getting, epigram-like flourishes that stuck in audience’s heads, like the final words emerging from the dark in I Was A Fugitive From A Chain Gang or the mail satchel hooked in They Won’t Forget symbolising a lynching. By the ‘50s he was a very safe and quite unadventurous pair of hands for pricey productions, but he hadn't lost his storytelling skill. Part of The FBI Story’s quality is its sense of a shifting material landscape, progressing from the canopied restaurants, sweaty offices, and romanticised classiness of 1920s train travel, to the air-conditioned, air-travelling shininess of the then-present day, with segues into the Southern night where the Ku Klux Klan marches with flaming crosses and stark apparel, and out to the still frontier-like reaches of the west, all filmed in the muted, silky textures of that specific late ‘50s Technicolor.

The way Le Roy’s film condenses and arranges some well-known cases into a kind of institutional bildungsroman that idealises Hoover’s leadership and the bureau’s moral rectitude along the way meant it becomes a perfect reference point for more pointedly questioning and shaded takes. As a result, one of the more incidentally interesting aspects of The FBI Story lies in how some of the stories it explores have been revisited by filmmakers over the years, including the vignette of Dillinger’s downfall giving John Milius and Michael Mann ideas, the final tale of Communist spies ends where Steven Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies (2015) starts, and the case of the Osage Indian murders recounted in an early episode also the subject of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon, which Martin Scorsese’s been intending to film. The overall thesis of the film, considering the way the FBI grew like a shell around Hoover’s projected personality, would provide structure for Clint Eastwood’s more muted and meditative take with J. Edgar (2011). Despite the film’s official squareness, it takes great delight in vividly illustrating all the death and mayhem, with strong special effects depicting the bombing of the plane and an Osage family’s house, and vignettes account for all the gangsters, including Pretty Boy Floyd who goes down in a shot filmed through a loophole, squeezing his open world down to a hard, narrow rectangle through the bullets catch him – another quintessential Le Roy epigram.

The depiction of Chip and Sam valiantly taking on the Klan, outwitting them in saving a crusading newspaper editor from their brutal attentions, somewhat glaringly contrasts the FBI’s infamous general slackness on civil rights issues under Hoover: notably, the film decries the Klan attacking a Jewish family – they’re seen upending a menorah – and not any African-Americans. It’s possible this episode was emphasised chiefly to expiate Le Roy’s lingering beef with the Klan, stirred but not sated by the tiptoeing condemnation in They Won’t Forget. The film tries to shrug off the FBI’s reputation for laggardness in that regard onto other forces: early in the film Chip tries to interest Dakins in taking on the form of quasi-slavery sustained by employers utilising debt traps to tie workers to the land, only to be met by Dakins’ feckless lack of interest, and Sam theorises he’s some kind of local networker nudged onto the federal pay roll. Perhaps the most interesting and vivid vignette involves the Osage case, which sees Chip investigating the murders of various Osage tribal folk after they become wealthy thanks to oil being discovered on the land (although the real events took place several years before the film’s timeline would have it). 

Le Roy creates a flavourful portrait of a gritty, muddy, ornery boom town where the Hardestys are far out of their desired climes, Chip’s fellow agents are all operating undercover – one poses as a loudmouth elixir salesman – and mass murderers pose as respectable citizens whilst their hired muscle hovers in the shadows. The vignette starts with some droll if patronising humour as Chip notes the various luxury items foisted by clever salesmen on the newly enriched Native Americans, from piles of bathtubs to a private telephone switchboard, before the darker side of the boom manifests, as a pair of hired killers plant dynamite under a target’s house and blow it sky high. The reunited Chip and Sam are then sent after gangsters and gain firepower when the massacre of some fellow agents forces political action, but then Sam is shot down by Nelson as he flees from a failed attempt to catch him and Dillinger. Sam’s teenaged son George (Michael Smith as a lad, Larry Pennell as an adult) becomes a de facto member of the Hardesty family and as he grows up he marries one of Chip and Lucy’s daughters, Anne (Joyce Taylor), but seems ambivalent about following in his father’s footsteps, only to find his own fighting purpose once World War II breaks out. Meanwhile Chip’s only son Mike (Buzz Martin) joins the Marines but dies fighting on Iwo Jima. 

When concentrating on the agents’ escapades The FBI Story is absorbing and piquant if tendentious. When the emphasis falls on Chip’s home life, which is often, it’s much stickier, and yet this aspect of the film imbues it with peculiar cohesion. In itself this is actually makes for a thankful contrast to the modern tendency to portray cop heroes as dysfunctional loners, but The FBI Story settles for mixing sappy stuff, like Chip getting annoyed by missing tissue paper only to find one of his girls has utilised it for the wings of her school nativity play costume, with constant repetitions of a basic scene in which Lucy gets upset by Chip sticking with his constantly uprooting and dangerous job, amplified (and justified) when her son takes the same route. Miles is stuck with the most thankless of roles and responds with a constant succession of concertedly shrill outbursts. The only positive aspect of this was that Alfred Hitchcock would put that side of Miles to better use in Psycho (1960). Lucy even flees Chip at one point with their kids – the propeller hat that tick out the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” Chip bought for mike is left to lend forlorn scoring to the passing seasons outside their kitchen window – only to return. 

Despite such private misgivings and lapses, The FBI Story ultimately presents the Hardestys as the essential American family, in keeping with Hoover’s ideal for his agents: they are the epitome of normality. Almost every aspect of the resulting film is designed to affirm not just the competence and purview of the FBI, but to situate it as something like a form of nationalist religion, perfectly entwined according to Hoover’s vision with pillars of family and civic life. Hoover and Clyde Tolson appear very briefly during an early montage, but in the historical sequences the director is portrayed in a manner discomfortingly reminiscent of Jesus in Ben-Hur(1959), glimpsed from behind or in silhouette, as when Chip recounts a mythologised version of how Hoover personally tracked down and arrested Alvin Karpis. There’s interesting disparity in the way the film breezily affirms the bureau’s correctness in sending out agents to work illegally in Latin American countries on the hunt for Nazi spies and then encouraging boo-hiss reactions to Communist spies doing the same thing in the US. 

Le Roy nonetheless swerves between movie genres with aplomb, grazing the Western in the Osage chapter before touring the ‘30s gangland drama, and making a segue into the jungle movie when Chip ventures into the backwoods of an unnamed South American country (implied to be Argentina) to save George when some government troops are sent to knock out his espionage outpost. Chip’s local guide Mario (Victor Millan) heroically dies blowing up a footbridge to prevent the pursuers catching up with them. The final case of busting a Red spy ring is replete with corny nudges (“Since he was a communist we knew he wouldn’t be going to church,” Chip drawls in voiceover), but it also coherently brings both the narrative and epochal progression into the then-present tense and in doing so lays down a blueprint for the next era in thriller filmmaking, the likes of The French Connection (1971) anticipated in the evocation of patient and nerveless tracking of a quarry through an urban environment. The very end sets the seal on the firm association of family and state with the propeller hat, now properly placed on the head of Chip and Lucy’s grandson and still tinkling out “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” is conflated with the paraphernalia of patriotism like the Lincoln and Iwo Jima Memorials as Chips considers how “one little family can collect so much junk.”