WALK EAST ON BEACON! (1952)

An opening narration tells us that the FBI protects us from a "worldwide conspiracy which seeks, through subversion, to destroy established governments everywhere"—in other words, the Communists. This film, based on a story written for Reader's Digest by J. Edgar Hoover himself, is the story of one FBI operation that broke open a Russian sleeper cell, a group of spies living in the U.S waiting patiently for their signal to begin espionage activities. The case is triggered when the wife of a taxi driver writes an anonymous letter to the FBI office in Boston claiming that a man named Robert Martin has been forcing her husband to pass along messages in a spy ring. Agents tail Martin to a docked Polish freighter but a different man wearing his clothes leaves. Martin, considered not effective enough, is chastised by Laschenkov who has been sent to Boston to take over Martin's duties. His mission is to extort information from Prof. Kafer, a refugee scientist and the leader of a American military project called Falcon, something involving national defense and the possibility of space travel (though since it's a McGuffin, it doesn't really matter what it's about). The Russians make contact with Kafer and tell him they can get his son out of East Berlin in exchange for information on Project Falcon—their instruction to him to "walk east on Beacon Street" gives the movie its title. He turns to the FBI to help him, and they do, though the comings and goings of the spies and the G-men got a little confusing to me.

Most of this is shot documentary style on actual Boston locations which keeps the proceedings fairly low-key, until, of course, the filmmakers decide they need an action scene or two. George Murphy, as the main FBI agent, delivers an appropriately low-key performance, leaving more attention-getting moments to Finlay Currie as the professor and Virginia Gilmore and Karel Stepanek as two of the more important commie spies. It certainly makes it seem as though Boston was absolutely honeycombed with spies, though the screenplay heavily fictionalized the original Hoover story. The film is featured on DVD as part of a film noir set, though it most assuredly is not noir. As a period anti-Communist propaganda piece, however, it's worth seeing. Pictured are Jack Manning and Vilma Kurer as the taxi driver and his wife. [TCM]