Trapped (Eagle-Lion, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (March 15) at 10 I ran my husband Charles yet another interesting movie from the 50-film “Crime Wave” DVD box: Trapped, a 1949 film noir (though The Film Noir Encyclopedia doesn’t list it) produced by Bryan Foy for Eagle-Lion Pictures. (As I never tire of explaining, Bryan Foy was one of the “Seven Little Foys” who did a vaudeville act with their dad, and he grew up to be head of the Warner Bros. “B” unit, while Eagle-Lion was a studio formed by J. Arthur Rank out of the old PRC, which he bought in 1947 to ensure himself a guaranteed U.S. distributor for his British productions; the name was supposed to symbolize the union of the U.S. and the U.K. by using both countries’ national animals.) Like tke much better-known T-Men, also from 1949, with a more prestigious director (Anthony Mann instead of Richard Fleischer) and cinematographer (John Alton instead of Guy Roe), Trapped was made under a contract Eagle-Lion had negotiated with the U.S. Treasury Department. Not only did the Treasury allow the crew to film in their headquarters and show the actual printing presses by which genuine U.S. currency is made, they were also allowed to show real money on screen – a big bozo-no-no in years past because the Treasury Department strictly controlled the manufacture of U.S. bills and didn’t want them on screen for fear of making counterfeiters’ jobs easier. (One of the funniest gags in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo is when the actor steps off the screen into the real world and finds his prop money isn’t accepted there.) Directed by Richard Fleischer from a script by Earl Felton and George Zuckerman (I know little or nothing about Felton, but Zuckerman was a prestigious writer, a New York native who collaborated with director Douglas Sirk on some of his 1950’s Universal-International classics, including Written on the Wind and The Tarnished Angels), Trapped is a bit more interesting than your standard cops-and-robbers drama mainly in the tricks Felton and Zuckerman played with the central characters’ identities.

It begins with a documentary prologue acknowledging the co-operation of the U.S. Treasury Department and noting all the functions that come under its supervision – quite a few of which are no longer undeer its jurisdiction. The U.S. Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Secret Service (the agency the film is about) are now part of the fascistically named “Department of Homeland Security,” while the responsibility for enforcing the anti-drug laws nwo falls under the Department of Justice. Then the film’s story begins with the sudden emergence of a $20 bill a woman restaurateur tries to deposit at an L.A. bank. The bank teller notices there’s something hinky about the bill and stamps it counterfeit, then sends it off to the Secret Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. as the woman is understandably put out by the loss of $20 (a much heftier amount in 1949 than it would be today). A lot of people forget (or never knew) that the Secret Service was originally formed in the 1860’s to combat counterfeiting as part of President Lincoln’s decision to have the government print paper money for the first time to help finance the Civil War. The business of protecting the President and others in the line of succession came later, after the third Presidential assassination in U.S. history, William McKinley’s in 1901. The Secret Service agents who examine the phony $20 bill realize it looks like the work of Tris Stewart (Lloyd Bridges, top-billed), who is currently serving a seven-year prison sentence in Atlanta. The Secret Service cuts a deal with Stewart – or at least they think they have – under which they will let him “escape” and track down the counterfeiters who are using his old and unusually good plates to print new fake $20 bills. Tris agrees to the deal but he has no intention of helping the Secret Service catch his former accomplices; instead, he intends to get his revenge on them and grab both his plates and the new stash of counterfeit bills they’ve printed with them.

One of the most interesting things about Trapped is that all three of the principal characters are living dual identities. Tris Stewsart is supposedly a Federal undercover agent but he’s really a crook (still). His old girlfriend, Meg Dixon (Barbara Payton, whose real life sounded very much like the noir villainesses she played), has relocated to L.A. where she’s working as a cigarette girl at the Chanteclair nightclub under the name “Laurie Fredericks.” And the third principal, John Hackett (John Hoyt), at first appears just to be a “masher,” a rich creep who keeps coming on to Meg a.k.a. Laurie in the crudest ways imaginable. But he’s really a Secret Service agent assigned to keep tabs on Tris by surveilling his girlfriend – who falls into Tris's arms with a visceral intensity that pushed the usual Production Code limits on physical displays of affection. In fact, Trapped is a Code-pushing movie not only in sex but in violence as well: the scene in which Tris beats up his earlier Secret Service “handler” and slips away from the agency’s supervision is quite intense and we’re not sure at the end whether he’s actually killed the agent or not. There’s a later scene in which one of the agents complains about how hard he had to let Tris hit him, but it’s not clear whether that refers to his escape from the hotel room or his earlier engineered “escape” from the bus taking him from Atlanta to Leavenworth, Kansas as part of a “planned” change in his sentence. Tris tracks down his old accomplice Sam Hooker (Douglas Spencer), to whom he’d entrusted the plates before he got busted, but Hooker is a gambling addict and alcoholic who sold the plattes and the stash of counterfeit cash to pay off his losses. After beating Hooker within an inch of his life, Tris finally learns that he sold the plates to gangster Jack Sylvester (James Todd). Tris tracks down Sylvester but learns that his price for giving him back the plates and $250,000 in counterfeit money Sylvester’s operation has printed for him is $25,000 in authentic U.S. currency.

Tris sets up an exchange, only Sylvester insists on doing a so-called “trial run” in which the alleged $250,000 turns out to be just strips of plain paper – which pisses off both Tris and the Secret Service agents who had the exchange staked out hoping to bust the participants red-handed. Meanwhile, Secret Service agent Hackett has been “outed” by two old friends of his, a couple who saw him at Chanteclair and, in Meg’s earshot, address him by his real name, John Downey. (By coincidence T-Men also features a scene in which an undercover Secret Service agent is “outed” by an acquaintance from his normal, non-undercover life, though in that film the bad guys kill him instantly while the agent’s wife, watchig helplessly, freezes a look of sheer contempt at her old friend, as if to say, “Thanks a lot for just signing my husband’s death warrant.”) The Secret Service agents arrest Tris and hold him incognito, then set out to find Meg before she can get in touch with the crooks and warn them that “Hackett” is really Agent Downey. Alas, they’re too late and Meg gets to the crooks first, though for some reason, instead of shooting Downey, Sylvester shoots her. Meanwhile, a sharp-eyed motorcycle cup from the L.A. Police Department spots the license number of Sylvester’s car outside the warehouse where his printing press is located, and there’s a final chase scene through beautifully staged and lit noir street sets (Guy Roe may not have John Alton’s reputation, but he’s equally good at the noir look here) in which Sylvester gets caught and grabs for the electrified third rail of an elevated trolley track, thereby meeting his end. As I joked to Charles, “third rail ex machina.”

Trapped hs a haunting movie – I find myself liking it better thinking back on it than I did when Charles and I were watching it – and whether the filmmakers intended it or not, they manage to make some very interesting points about the very concept of identity and its fragility. The three central characters are all living double lives, and one of the most fascinating aspects of the film is how the conflicts between their official selves and their real ones shape them and, in some cases, doom them. It also has one of the best-written characterizations for a woman in the entire noir canon; Barbara Payton is not a femme fatale leading an innocent hero to destruction, nor is she the standard-issue “gangster’s moll,” but a tough, no-nonsense woman living her life on her own terms and expressing her sexuality as she sees fit. Her only real fault is an unwise (to say the least!) attraction to a no-good man.