T-Men (Edward Small Productions, Bryan Foy Productions, Eagle-Lion, Reliance Pictures, Pathé Industries, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After The Great Race on Saturday, April 4, Turner Classic Movies had an episode of their “Noir Alley” series in which they featured the 1947 film T-Men, directed by Anthony Mann from a script by Virginia Kellogg (story) and John C. Higgins (screenplay). It was made at Eagle-Lion Pictures, the studio formed when British film producer and distributor J. Arthur Rank bought the old Producers’ Releasing Corporation (PRC) to guarantee himself an American outlet for his British productions. He’d previously been selling them on a one-off basis to various U.S. studios, mostly Universal, but he wanted his own company in the U.S. and he chose the name to symbolize the union of American (eagle) and British (lion) interests in the new company. Eagle-Lion would have its first blockbuster “A”-list film, The Red Shoes, in 1948, but a year before they made this one and it also did sensationally well at the box office. T-Men – the title is short for “Treasury Men” and dealt with agents of the U.S. Secret Service, which was originally founded during the Civil War to enforce the laws against counterfeiting (the business of protecting the President and a number of other federal officials would come later, after the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901) – is noteworthy as the first U.S. film that was actually allowed, by special dispensation of the Treasury Department, to show real U.S. money on screen. Previously the government had insisted that all movie money be singularly obvious props – one of the best gags in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) is when a movie character steps off the screen into the real world and finds his prop money isn’t accepted here – but since the whole plot of T-Men dealt with the differences between counterfeit money and the real federal deal, producers Aubrey Schenck and Edward Small got the government to allow them to show “real green” on screen. In his introduction, “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller described T-Men as a really schizophrenic film, part police procedural, part semi-documentary, and part film noir.

T-Men begins with a two-minute narration by a real (albeit retired by then) Treasury agent, Elmer Lincoln Irey, announcing that the film is a composite story called “The Shanghai Paper Case” mashed together from various real cases in which the Treasury Department was involved. Eddie Muller was scathing about Irey’s narration (fortunately, he was sidelined and another narrator, Reed Hadley, filled in key bits of exposition later on, though frankly the film would have been stronger without narration at all. There were a number of semidocumentaries that used narrators, beginning with 1945’s The House on 92nd Street, that were doing well at the box office at the time, but Muller singled out the shot in which Moxie (Charles McGraw), hired killer for a gang of counterfeiters, looms out of a chiaroscuro darkness to knock off a would-be informer and T-Men suddenly looks like a noir. Muller credited the shot to the film’s cinematographer, John Alton, who once wrote a textbook for aspiring directors of photography called Painting with Light and described this sort of shot as “criminal lighting.” This was the first of five films Mann and Alton would work on jointly, and the visuals on this one are consistently stunning and a real testament to the skill of both director and cinematographer to do quality work on a low budget. (T-Men cost $425,000 to make and grossed over $3 million.) The head of the Secret Service in Los Angeles notes that three agents so far have been unable to get the goods on the L.A.-based counterfeiting ring, so he’s going to recruit two new agents to infiltrate the gang’s criminal associates in Detroit because a stray piece of evidence has linked the gang to the old Vantucci mob in Detroit. Among the tools they have at their disposal are a set of hand-engraved plates for making phony $10 bills captured from a former counterfeiter named Bremer, who’s now safely locked away in prison in Atlanta. The L.A. gang has cheaper photo-engraved plates but a much superior supply of bill paper being smuggled into them from China.

The two agents who get assigned to infiltrate the Vantucci mob in Detroit are Dennis O’Brien (Dennis O’Keefe, who’d previously been known for comedies and musicals but was seeking the same transition into film noir Dick Powell had pulled off superlatively in the 1944 film Murder, My Sweet) and Tony Genaro (Alfred Ryder). O’Brien is single but Genaro has been married for two years; Genaro also speaks Italian, which will be useful in infiltrating an Italian gang. The two T-men arrive in Detroit and prep for their roles as mobsters by reading back issues of Detroit newspapers. They decide to pose as the last two surviving members of “The River Gang” and O’Brien takes the name “Vannie Harrigan” while Genaro becomes “Tony Galvani.” They successfully persuade mob boss Carlo Vantucci (Anton Kosta) of their criminal bona fides and get sent back to L.A. to contact the counterfeiters there, who are making not only phony U.S. bills but also phony alcohol tax stamps, which the gang uses to get liquor to the bars they control without having to pay taxes on it. The gang’s L.A. activities center around a dive called the “Club Trinidad,” whose photographer gets her photos developed at a lab controlled by the counterfeiters. While in Detroit, O’Brien and Genaro obtained a uniform used by one of the gang members, “Schemer” (Wallace Ford) – if he had a normal name, we never learn it – and send it back to the Treasury crime lab in D.C. for analysis. The lab reveals that the uniform’s owner is 5’ 9”, weighs about 190 pounds, smokes cigars, and chews medicinal herbs from China. That last bit of information gives O’Brien and Genaro the lead they need; they learn from the herbalist Schemer used that he likes steam baths, and they check out all the steam baths in the vicinity of L.A.’s Chinatown until they finally locate him. Armed with one of the gang’s phony bills, O’Brien crashes an illegal back-room craps game at which Schemer is a “regular” and tries to pass the bill, but he’s caught and Schemer and other gang members beat him up.

Ultimately O’Brien in his “Harrigan” identity gets Vantucci from Detroit to vouch for him, and he proposes that the two gangs go into business together, since they have a superior source of bill paper while he has better plates. O’Brien gives the gang the back half of the plates but says he’ll keep the front half until the deal is set and he meets the boss of the whole operation. Meanwhile, Genaro is “outed” when his wife, who’s been visiting a woman friend in San Francisco, goes with her to L.A. The friend immediately recognizes Genaro and calls him by his real name, alerting the gang that he’s not who he said he was. Genaro heatedly denies that he has a wife, and there’s a chilling close-up of Mrs. Genaro (June Lockhart) with a hostile expression on her face that tells her friend (and us), “You’ve just signed my husband’s death warrant.” Genaro is duly executed by the mob – they kill him with O’Brien watching but helpless to intervene – and so is Schemer, who’s locked inside a steam bath while his killer turns up the steam to scalding hot and leaves him to die from it. (One wonders if Don Siegel saw this film and got the idea for a similar steam-bath murder in his 1964 film The Killers.) But before he died, Schemer told O’Brien that he had a secret notebook stashed away that revealed, in code, all the gang’s nastiest activities. O’Brien is able to recover the notebook via a claim check for a storage locker Schemer hid in his apartment, and when he gets the book to D.C. his bosses announce that it contains all sorts of juicy information that will keep law enforcement busy for years to come. The final confrontation takes place aboard a ship, the Don Anselmo (though I was tempted to joke, based on The Maltese Falcon, that it was really La Paloma), where the counterfeiters have their printing press in operation. O’Brien has got a tip from his colleagues that Miller, the gang’s technical expert, is a former associate of Bauman, the now-incarcerated counterfeiter who engraved the super-plates in the first place, and could recognize them and “out” him. Miller tells the gang members he has no idea where the plates came from, then takes O’Brien aside and tells him he does know where the plates came from, he’s figured out that O’Brien is a T-man, but he vouched for him in hopes of getting a reduced sentence and becoming a cooperating witness. Alas for Miller, his gangland associates shoot him down and he dies. O’Brien is also shot, but his fellow Treasury agents in association with the Los Angeles Police Department raid the boat, arrest the crooks, and rescue the injured T-man.

The complexity of that plot summary reflects why I didn’t care for T-Men the first time I saw it in the early 1970’s; it was a hard movie to follow and all the welter of plots and counter-plots got awfully confusing after a while. Fortunately I’ve seen it at least twice since, and it’s grown on me. One unusual aspect about T-Men is that it’s not all that easy to tell the cops and the crooks apart; they’re all dressed similarly in fedora hats and baggy suits (on seeing O’Brien in the pin-striped suit the Secret Service got for him, my husband Charles said it was the worst-fitting suit he’d ever seen in a film), and if nothing else this film makes the point that both the criminals and the cops are parts of well-heeled organizations and there’s little room for individual heroics on either side. I also liked the idea that the ultimate boss’s immediate lieutenant was a woman. T-Men is an effective melodrama, uneasily perched between semi-documentary, police procedural and film noir, but Mann’s direction and Alton’s cinematography make this one something special. As for Dennis O’Keefe, he turns in a quite good performance that accomplished the Dick Powell-style transformation of his image for which both he and Edward Small (who was not only co-producer of the film but also O’Keefe’s agent) were hoping. Ironically, the film was actually produced by a gangster, the star-struck Johnny Roselli, who had come to Hollywood to take control of the corrupt International Association of Theatrical and Stage Employees (IATSE) union. They were in the middle of a jurisdictional battle with the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) over who would organize the construction crews who built sets, and one key element in Ronald Reagan’s political transformation from New Deal liberal to rock-ribbed Right-winger was when he found out that the CSU was controlled by the Communist Party. So he shifted his support in the jurisdictional battle to IATSE because he decided that, compared with the Communists, the Mafia were clearly the lesser of two evils. Roselli had formed a film producing partnership with, of all people, Hollywood’s chief censor, Production Code enforcer Joseph Breen, and though Aubrey Schenck (whose father, Joseph Schenck, had served a six-month prison sentence for his involvement in Roselli’s corrupt business and union dealings) and Edward Small were the named producers, it was really Roselli and Breen who called the shots and came up with the money to make this ostensibly anti-crime film.