FBI Girl (Jedgar Productions, Lippert Pictures, 1951)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On May 11 after Judd Family: Truth Be Told my husband Charles and I huddled in front of the computer and watched an engaging if simple-minded thriller from Lippert Pictures in 1951 called FBI Girl. It’s actually set in a relatively small community called “Central City,” which is apparently its state’s capital, and it begins with an anxious conference between the state’s governor, Owen Grisby (Raymond Greenleaf), and his overall fixer, Blair (Raymond Burr, in a riveting performance that commands the movie). Grisby is concerned that the U.S. Senate committee investigating organized crime is coming to Central City, and while publicly he presents a façade of unconcern, privately he’s worried sick over a murder he committed 20 years before under the name “John Williams.” He’s particularly concerned that the FBI has a card with his fingerprints on file in their Washington, D.C. main office, and he wants to make that card, the biggest piece of evidence against him, “disappear.” Blair has a way out of that: he knows a Washington ne’er-do-well named Paul Craig (Don Garner) whose sister Natalie (Margia Dean) just happens to work as a fingerprint file clerk in the FBI’s offices. Paul somehow inveigles Natalie to steal Williams’s fingerprint card from the FBI files, but she’s inadvertently caught doing it by a fellow clerk who bumps into her as she’s extracting the card and wonders why she’s removing a card without a proper permission slip. Natalie gets away, though she doesn’t have the card, and Blair, who isn’t a leaving-loose-ends-lying-around kind of guy, sends out a hit man named George Denning (Alexander Pope) to kill both Natalie and Paul. Denning kills Natalie but Paul is only wounded, though that’s no problem for Denning: he sneaks into the hospital room were Paul is being wounded disguised as a priest, and manages to work his way in despite a nurse and a real priest who just happen to be visiting Paul Craig’s room while Denning was there to kill him. One wonders why neither the D.C. police nor the FBI have bothered to put a security detail on Paul’s room, but that becomes apparent when Denning shows up to make a second attempt on Paul’s life – only the figure in the bed is not Paul but a law-enforcement officer pretending to be him. Various good guys, including the film’s two leads, FBI special agents Glen Stedman (Cesar Romero) and Jeff Donley (George Brent), try to catch Denning, but instead of being taken alive he’s chased to the ledge of a hospital building and ultimately falls to his death.

Anxious to get the fingerprint card neutralized as a piece of evidence, back in Central City Blair hits on the idea of making up a fake FBI fingerprint card with Governor Grisby’s prints on it but allegedly belonging to a “John Williams,” a character they’ll create out of thin air by killing off an alcoholic derelict and passing him off as Williams so the FBI will declare Williams dead and the case against him closed. Only Agents Stedman and Donley get suspicious over the difference between the description they have on file for “Williams” and the one accompanying the prints sent over from Central City. What’s more, Blair now has not just one murder to cover up, but three (plus the more or less accidental death of his hit man Denning), and Governor Grisby (ya remember Governor Grisby?) is getting antsy about the whole thing and tells Blair that maybe, just maybe, the best thing for him to do would be to resign and turn himself in. (No doubt writers Rupert Hughes – Howard Hughes’s uncle – Dwight V. Babcock and Richard H. Landau were channeling Claude Rains’s character from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington here.) And he still doesn’t have Governor Grisby’s incriminating fingerprint card as “John Williams,” though he’s got another ace up his sleeve. Carl Chercourt (Tom Drake) is a lobbyist in the pay of Blair’s organization who’s dating another FBI file clerk, Shirley Wayne (Audrey Totter) – who, in a preposterous coincidence the writers should have been ashamed of, is one of three roommates of the late Natalie Craig – and is engaged to marry her. He tries to get her to steal the incriminating “Williams” fingerprint card, but she’s honest enough to report the approach to Stedman and Donley, who make a copy of the “Williams” card to use as a decoy to flush the conspirators out in the open. Chercourt, operating from a palatial apartment decorated in moderne style (I suspect it was the home of one of the film’s producers and was in the L.A. area), pleads with Shirley for her understanding, saying he’s the son of a U.S. Senator who always tried to help other people and died penniless, so he’s determined to be an influence-peddler and make as much money as he can. Ultimately he, Blair and Grisby are all arrested.

FBI Girl is a surprisingly competent thriller despite some wild improbabilities in the plot, and for that we have mostly director William Berke to thank. Berke had risen from independent filmmaking to a stable berth at RKO making the later films in the Falcon detective series in the mid-1940’s, but with RKO’s decision to get out of the “B”-picture business in 1947 and Howard Hughes’s takeover of the studio a year later, Berke was back to working independently; he would film the first two novels in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, Cop Hater (1957) and The Mugger (1958), just before his death in 1958 at the relatively young age of 54. Berke manages to keep FBI Girl moving swiftly and get some relatively creative camera compositions out of his cinematographer, PRC veteran Jack Greenhalgh. It’s a nicely done thriller even though Cesar Romero and George Brent are bizarrely bland as the heroes and Audrey Totter, who in previous films like The Lady in the Lake (1947) was alluring and acted capably, here sinks to an almost porn-star level of incompetence. No wonder Raymond Burr easily takes the acting honors: he’s implacable and almost supernatural in his ability to anticipate the good guys’ plans and thwart them – until he runs out of luck and “juice” by the end. Also one amusing aspect of FBI Girl is the name of the production company set up to make it: “Jedgar Productions,” after the long-time (1924 to 1972) FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who during his lifetime insisted on approval rights for every movie and TV show made about the FBI and its agents.