Robert Z. Leonard's The Bribe (1949)

The Bribe has all the necessary ingredients to make a good film noir --an aura of post-WWII fatalism, a disillusioned law enforcement officer, a femme fatale, fascinating but slimy villains, chiaroscuro lighting and cinematography, the source story from Black Mask writer Frederick Nebel -- except the right director and the right studio.  MGM tended to pull its punches in this genre; think how The Bribe might have turned out if it had been directed by Jacques Tourneur at RKO instead of Robert Z. Leonard.  Leonard was known for relatively frivolous work -- he directed a number of Nelson Eddy/Jeanette MacDonald vehicles -- while Tourneur directed gritty films for Val Lewton before directing Out of the Past in 1947.

The Bribe resembles Out of the Past in a number of superficial ways --falling in love with the bad girl in a South American locale and being morally compromised -- but is too lacking in ambiguity and its fatalism is too compromised.  As Robert Taylor grew older he made more genre films -- Westerns and policiers -- but he was not quite as successful in the transfer from lighter fare as John Payne, James Stewart and Dick Powell.  Still, Taylor does a decent job as his voice-over narration struggles between his desire for justice and his passion for saloon singer Ava Gardner, while Charles Laughton and Vincent Price try to thwart his investigation into their crooked racket in war surplus materials.  Joseph Ruttenberg (who was the cinematographer on Fritz Lang's Fury in 1936) does a beautiful job with the black-and-white photography, capturing the steamy, sweaty environment. Miklos Rozsa's score is intense, though perhaps not as good as the one he did for Robert Siodmak's The Killers in 1946.  I generally don't care for happy endings in film noir but I give Leonard credit for irony at the end of The Bribe.