John Sturges's The People Against O'Hara (1951)

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I, generally, consider the director the major creative force on a film.  In this day and age where most movies are, to a greater or lesser extent, meretricious one tends to notice more the major contributions to classical films of other artists.  I have, for instance, always enjoyed movies where Ennio Moriconne wrote the music or John Alton did the cinematography, as he did for The People Against O'Hara.  Alton demonstrated a mastery of chiaroscuro in several black-and-white films for Anthony Mann (Raw Deal, 1948; T-Men, 1947; Reign of Terror, 1949) and uses it most effectively in The People Against O'Hara, directed by the sometimes workman-like John Sturges.

There are enough elements of the film noir in The People Against O'Hara to qualify it for that genre, even if those elements -- fatalism, confusion, compromised authority -- are played down in this MGM film the way they would not be at RKO or Warner Brothers.   There is even a small part for a femme fatale -- played by Yvette Duguay-- the wife of a mobster who is the alibi for O'Hara, who is too afraid of her husband to admit their relationship.  Spencer Tracy, who was 51 when this film was made, had been playing old men for years.  His dipsomania (in the film, that is) had made him turn from criminal law to civil but he decides to make a last stand to help the O'Hara family; the Irish in this film are mostly good guys, the Italians are the bad guys.

When Tracy slips back into drinking he bribes a witness in the trial and when he returns home to his loving daughter (played intelligently by Diana Lynn) the shadows of the railing on his stairs reflect on him rather like the bars of a cell.  The film begins with an example of light and dark -- a murder viewed ambiguously in the light of a doorway in the distance of a dark street --and continuously sees the streets of New York as very much like the characters in the film, a combination of light and shadow.