WIRETAPPER (1955)

As WWII winds to an end, Alice (Georgia Lee) is anxiously waiting for her fiancé Jim Vaus (Bill Williams) to come home. He's stationed stateside but keeps getting transfers from one place to another and can't seem to get a furlough to come home. As we find out, the truth is that Jim is in a military jail for stealing equipment and has his letters to Alice smuggled out to be mailed from various locations. But after V-J Day, Jim is pardoned and given a lecture by a chaplain who knows about Jim's letters and urges him to tell Alice the truth when he gets home—but when he's face to face with her, he can't bring himself to do so. Still, their reunion is happy and he goes into business as an electrical engineering consultant. Business is quite slow at first, but when he performs a minor repair job for a lawyer named Rumsden, he discovers by accident that Rumsden's house is bugged. It turns out that Rumsden is a lawyer for gangsters, and he quickly hires Jim to do a wiretapping job for him on a woman trying to muscle into the local prostitution ring. The cops catch him doing it, but because the tap provides enough info to jail the madam, they turn a blind eye. Soon, Jim is working for other shady characters, his "business" becomes a success, and he and Alice (whom he keeps in the dark about his clients as long as he can) get married. Eventually, he tells Alice about his past and she's forgiving, but as his jobs become more numerous, he neglects his wife, even missing the birth of their first child. After pulling off a scam in which Jim delays the ticker-tape results of horse races to fix some bets, Jim wants to leave the rackets, especially with Alice pregnant again, but he finds that difficult to do—until Alice drags him into a Billy Graham revival tent.

Bet you weren’t expecting Billy Graham as a deus ex machina at the climax. I wasn't either, and it doesn't play very well, even though this movie is based on a memoir by the real Jim Vaus, so perhaps that's what really happened. Up to that point, religion has barely been mentioned, making the ending feel even stranger. Overall, it's a so-so B-crime movie with film noir elements—primarily the conflicted hero—but with nothing interesting going on in terms of style or acting. Bill Williams is fine in the lead, and Ric Roman (as a gangster) and Stanley Clements (as a lesser thug) are good in support. But Georgia Lee is pretty terrible as the wife, accentuating Alice's whiny clinginess and squeaky-clean personality, giving the character no shadings at all. As far as the issue of the noir hero, Jim has been cutting moral corners all his life, but Williams plays him as a pleasant and not terribly thoughtful person, not really all that conflicted about how he makes a living. According to contemporary newspaper accounts, the film was originally shown at churches and at revivals, but it did eventually receive a theatrical release. Mostly recommended to fans of 50s B-movies; it's competently made and hardly painful viewing but it’s also not all that memorable . . . until Billy Graham appears. [YouTube]