Chicago Syndicate (Clover, Columbia, 1955)

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

Last night (Saturday, October 17) my husband Charles and I watched an intriguing 1955 gangster film called Chicago Syndicate on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” show on Turner Classic Movies. This was one of a cycle of movies with city names in their titles that purported to expose the stranglehold organized crime had on those areas. In his intro, Muller compared it to the 1949 Paramount movie Chicago Deadline and said that Paramount had spent $1.2 million on their film while producer Sam Katzman, who made this film through his own Clover company with Columbia as his distributor, spent just $125,000. At least part of the differential was due to a much lower-voltage cast in the principal roles; while Chicago Deadline had starred Alan Ladd and Donna Reed; the leads in Chicago Syndicate were Dennis O’Keefe (visibly older and more avuncular than he’d been in the mid-1940’s when he transitioned from musicals and romantic comedies into noir) and Allison Hayes. Chicago Syndicate begins with the on-the-streets drive-by shooting of accountant Nelson Kern, whose wife commits suicide that night because she doesn’t want to live with the shame of having her late husband exposed as a front for gangster Arnold “Arnie” Valent (Paul Stewart, the butler from Citizen Kane and afterwards a quite frequent villain in crime films like this). A Secret Six-like combine of local newspaper owners, businesspeople and relatively honest politicians forms to get rid of Valent and his crooked enterprises once and for all, but they face a problem. Thanks to Kern and his accounting expertise, the money the gangsters earn from their illegal enterprises (including gambling, off-track horse-race betting, and extortion) has been routed and re-routed through a batch of supposedly legitimate business enterprises, one of which, Olympic Insurance, hires Barry Amsterdam (Dennis O’Keefe), as an accountant. Barry is really a secret agent for the combine that’s trying to put Valent out of business; a veteran of World War II, he’s an expert on tax law. He crashes one of Valent’s illegal casinos one night and enlists well-dressed society woman Sue Morton (Allison Hayes, quite capable here even though three years later she was doing cheap sci-fi dreck like Attack of the 50-Foot Woman) to do so.

What he doesn’t realize – and neither do we until midway through the film ¬– is that “Sue Morton” is really Joyce Kern, daughter of the murdered accountant, who’s set out on her own campaign to bring Valent to justice for having had her dad murdered and her mom driven to suicide. Amsterdam (whose name sounds so phony I kept expecting it to be an alias, too, though it isn’t) got hired to take down the titular Chicago syndicate (which actually operates nationwide, though the Windy City is its center) with a promise of $60,000 as a reward payment, with which he intends to start his own accounting firm, though he laconically says he’s reluctant to take the job because he’s worried he won’t live long enough to collect. The illegal casino operates in the back room of a legitimate nightclub where the star attraction is Benny Chico (Xavier Cugat, who in the 1930’s and 1940’s had been the top Latin American bandleader in the U.S. until Desi Arnaz replaced him). Chico’s singer is Connie Peters (Abbe Lane, Cugat’s real-life wife at the time and the one person in the film who gets to play a role of real moral complexity), who’s also Valent’s girlfriend de jour. Unfortunately, he's got tired of her and wants to replace her with Sue Morton even though Sue is attracted to Amsterdam even before she learns that he’s really a secret agent out to bring down Valent (which she learns from the police, who figure that if she knows who he is and what side he’s really on they’ll be able to coordinate their anti-Valent activities). Amsterdam rather passively lets Valent go after Sue without any apparent objection, which gets some interesting what-kind-of-man-are-you reactions from Connie, who wonders why he’s being so cavalier as to let Valent move in on his girl. At first mistrustful of Amsterdam, Valent takes him into his confidence when Amsterdam, with the help of the police, engineers a phony insurance claim and thereby saves Olympic Insurance $75,000 (though Amsterdam demands $5,000 of the savings for himself as a “Christmas bonus”).

Eventually Amsterdam learns that there are two sets of books for Valent’s enterprises, the above-board one that the Internal Revenue Service knows about and the secret ones that Valent keeps in his own handwriting and are at the apartment of his mother (Carroll McComas), who’s completely ignorant that her son is a gangster. When Amsterdam finally learns where the secret set of books are kept, he’s too late: Valent is shown carefully burning them all and thereby making the evidence against him literally go up in smoke. Fortunately, the late accountant Nelson Kern, who had access to Valent’s secret books, had them microfilmed and hidden in a secret location. The only people who know the hiding place are Connie, whom Valent and his thugs torture (we only hear the sounds of her being beaten off-screen, but there’s a surprisingly graphic shot of her later on showing just how much damage Valent’s henchmen have done to her face), and Benny, who out of love for Connie gives away the secret that the microfilm is hidden in a spare violin case in storage at a local music shop. (I wondered if the writers, William Sackheim for the story and Joseph Hoffman for the script, borrowed this device from Puccini’s Tosca, only reversing the genders; in the opera, based on a play by Victorien Sardou, it’s Tosca who blurts out the secret to prevent the bad guys from torturing her lover Cavaradossi.) The crooks head out to the music store, where Valent finds the microfilm and are about to set it on fire when Amsterdam, despite being outnumbered three to one, manages to push Valent, grab the microfilm, and escape. Naturally the crooks hunt him down, and in a final climax that takes place in a tunnel of mysterious provenance (it looks like a subway tunnel even though Chicago’s light-rail transit system is a network of elevated trains rather than a subway; later we’re told it’s to move goods from one department store to another without them getting caught in urban traffic). Amsterdam, who’s unarmed at first but manages to get a gun from somewhere (until it runs out of bullets and he’s helpless again), holds out long enough until the police, summoned by Sue, finally arrive and shoot down Valent just as he’s about to kill Amsterdam. Amsterdam and Sue end up together and the usual stentorian narrator of the film (Richard H. Cutting) announces that the microfilm was used to convict all the surviving members of the syndicate and therefore put it out of business … at least for now.

Chicago Syndicate was billed on Eddie Muller’s TCM program as a film noir but it’s really more of a gangster movie; aside from Connie, all the characters are either 100 percent good or 100 percent evil. What’s more, despite the presence of two talented cinematographers (Henry Freulich and Fred Jackman, Jr., the latter the son of one of the earliest special-effects pioneers in the silent era), Chicago Syndicate doesn’t even look like a film noir until the final scene. By 1955 the movie studios had taken advantage of the greater portability of film equipment to shoot on real locations, which meant a gain in authenticity (plenty of recognizable Chicago landmarks, including the Wrigley Building, are seen in this film) but a loss of the kinds of claustrophobic chiaroscuro effects possible in studio set-build “exteriors.” Also by 1955 the studios had ended their Cold War with television and were starting to sell TV networks and local stations the rights to air their films once they were done with their theatrical runs. As a result, producers and studio executives were starting to order cinematographers to avoid high-contrast lighting and shoot their films with a greyer, more “even” look because the shadows of classic noir wouldn’t reproduce well on the low-contrast, low-resolution over-the-air images of the black-and-white TV sets of the time. Chicago Syndicate emerges as a competent, workmanlike thriller, decently directed by Fred F. Sears (who was also making the quickie rock ‘n’ roll films for Katzman and Columbia at the time, as well as an outlier, 1957’s Calypso Heat Wave, which made the spectacularly wrong prediction that calypso would replace rock as the popular music of young America but came off as better than Sears’s rock movies, I suspect because calypso turned him on a lot more than rock did!) until his career and his life both came to a skidding halt when he died of a heart attack on November 30, 1957 at just 44. (He worked so fast he had five films, Crash Landing, The World Was His Jury, Going Steady, Badman’s Country, and Ghost of the China Sea, left “in the can” to be released after his death.)