Trapped (1949)
Directed by Richard Fleischer

Film Review

Whilst it can't be denied that Richard Fleischer achieved some impressive things with the big budget movies that made his name - 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), Fantastic Voyage (1966) and  Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) - you can't help feeling that it was on his early, low budget productions that he was at his most inspired.  Having launched into his filmmaking career with an impressive trio of film noir dramas for RKO - Bodyguard  (1948), The Clay Pigeon (1949) and Follow Me Quietly (1949) - Fleischer lent his talents to Eagle-Lion, an offshoot of the Rank Organisation, for another dose of high testosterone noir.  A few years back, Eagle-Lion had scored a notable success with T-Men (1947), so the company was presumably hoping to strike lucky again with a virtually identical film made on a shoestring budget.  Trapped is one of the cheapest films that Fleischer directed and yet it hides its cheapness well, thanks to some smart direction and a mercilessly taut screenplay.  This is classic film noir at its most brutally realistic and compelling.

Impressive as the film is, it has to be said that it does not begin well.  With a voiced-over preamble that tediously lauds the efforts of the U.S. Treasury Department to thwart the counterfeiters Trapped initially resembles one of those irritating public information films of the 1940s, crass government propaganda at its most unsubtle and ingratiating.  Once this grotesquely misplaced intro is over and done with, and the film has begun proper, things take on a very different complexion.  What Fleischer and his writing team have in store for us is a gripping tale of dark duplicity and deadly deceit that builds to one of the most visually impressive finales of any B-movie of this era.

Lloyd Bridges is a surprisingly effective casting choice for the hardboiled hoodlum we end up siding with as he falls foul of a fiendishly cunning plot by treasure agents to recover some counterfeiters' plates.  It's a strange thing that a film which begins by sanctifying the employees of the Treasury Department should end up compelling its audience to root for the scum that this department is trying its best to eradicate.  But that's the classic noir formula: the hero isn't always the guy who is on the side of the angels, it's the one who gets caught up in the mare's nest of intrigue, with precious little chance of escape.   As the obligatory cool blonde, Barbara Payton is far more than a pretty accessory; her character is as essential to the plot as Bridges is, and is almost as tough.   Hers is the one performance that stands out, the token female in a world of cordite-scented machismo.

It's a familiar scenario but Fleischer gives it a heightened sense of drama throughout with his no-nonsense, near-documentary style of filmmaking.  Whilst the film doesn't set out to make the resourceful Treasury agents (or T-men) the villains of the piece, they are revealed to be a chillingly powerful force endowed with almost superhuman qualities, and you can be forgiven for feeling slightly paranoid at the end of this clean-up operation.  In the closing minutes of this solid thriller Fleischer surpasses himself with a spectacular, harrowingly claustrophobic chase sequence which seems to pay homage to Carol Reed's The Third Man (1949).  Fleischer would go on to make even more remarkable films noirs than this - including the superb The Narrow Margin (1951) - but Trapped contains some of his most inventive work and is one film that no true noir connoisseur should overlook.

Film Synopsis

To foil a money counterfeiting operation the U.S. Treasury Department recruits a convicted counterfeiter Tris Stewart, offering a full pardon in return for his help in bringing the wrong-doers to justice.  After a staged escape, Stewart gives his T-man escort the slip and immediately sets about finding who is using his plates to print counterfeit notes which are virtually identical to the real thing.  Stewart is offered a quarter of a million in counterfeit dollars if he can put up 25,000 in real dollars.  This he hopes to raise from Downey, a man he meets in a nightclub where his girlfriend Laurie works.  Unbeknown to Stewart, Downey is a Treasury agent who is about to lead him into a trap.  When Laura discovers Downey's true identity she makes a desperate attempt to warn Stewart, but in vain...