Will the T-Men shut down the shady operation?
Tris doesn’t know it, but he’s still under surveillance. Meg puts Tris in contact with John Downey (John Hoyt), a shady, well-heeled gambler interested in fronting the cash for the hot money deal. He reunites with his old girlfriend Meg Dixon (Barbara Payton), a nightclub cigarette girl. Tris is supposed to go undercover for the law but instead eludes supervision and contacts his old cronies with the goal of selling a huge amount of bad money to fund a Mexico getaway. An elaborate ruse sets him up Tris as an escapee. The Treasury Department springs prison inmate Tris Stewart (Lloyd Bridges) to help track down a gang of counterfeiters that have gotten a hold of a terrific set of printing plates. At five-foot-four she was an inch or so shorter than James Cagney - which surely helped win her the co-starring part in her next picture, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. Barbara Payton delivers the hot-number looks and projects her sex appeal emotionally as well it makes sense that this modest film would launch her brief but impressive career. This time around a crook is the main character - Lloyd Bridges impresses as a greedy, slippery convict disinterested in moral reform. The picture has a surplus of the elements that make crime noir so much fun. The progressive-thinking Earl Felton-George Zuckerman screenplay jumps ahead of the audience more than once, fooling us as to what exactly we’re seeing. Basically another undercover agent tale about a counterfeiting ring, this modest noir makes the most of the thriller format. Leading lady Barbara Peyton made a striking debut, and director Richard Fleischer further enhanced his credibility as well. It’s one of Eagle-Lion’s follow-ups to the great Anthony Mann/John Alton hits T-Men and Raw Deal, made by an all-pro team determined to do a bang-up job - and boost their careers. For the last forty years it has been seen only in terrible, blurry Public Domain copies. 1949’s Trapped is another dazzling example of a threatened noir, the loss of which would constitute a real crime. Their most miraculous save-job prevented a terrific noir thriller with a female protagonist from possibly being lost forever: 1950’s Woman on the Run. The Film Noir Foundation has done it again - the non-profit has racked up sufficient rescue-restoration victories to quality as the most effective film detectives not working directly from inside a public institution. Starring: Lloyd Bridges, Barbara Payton, John Hoyt, James Todd, Russ Conway, Robert Karnes, Stephen Chase, Tommy Noonan, Douglas Spencer. The Film Noir Foundation experts give us an expertly curated slice of hardboiled crime - Eddie Muller dubs it ‘To Live and Die in L.A.,’ but in the year that the Reds took over mainland China, and the USSR exploded its first Atom bomb.ġ949 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 78 min. Noir Nirvana isn’t found amid literary swells and hoity-toity art connoisseurs - but in the trenches of humble Eagle-Lion Films, where Richard Fleischer, Lloyd Bridges and a hotter-than-hot Barbara Payton steamed up the streets of Los Angeles circa 1949.
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