Hoodlum Empire (Republic, 1952)

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

Last night (Tuesday, June 17) I showed my husband Charles a YouTube post of a movie from Republic Pictures in 1952 that proved to be unexpectedly good: Hoodlum Empire. Like a lot of movies in the early 1950’s, it was inspired by the real-life televised U.S. Senate hearings led by Estes Kefauver (D-Tennessee) investigating the Mafia and the extent of organized crime’s reach into American life. In this version the Kefauver character is New York Senator Bill Stephens (Brian Donlevy, playing an honest politician 12 years after he famously played a corrupt one in Preston Sturges’ first film as a director, The Great McGinty), whom we first meet as chair of a Senate hearing on organized crime in general and the activities of New York gangster Nick Mancani (Luther Adler) in particular. Mancani is an ex-bootlegger who after Prohibition was repealed got into gambling, particularly slot machines, punchboards (a gambling device similar to today’s lottery scratchers; as the Wikipedia page on them explains, “Punchboards were often used by the slot-machine rackets as a wedge for pushing into communities where slot machines were illegal”), off-track horse racing and other sports bets. (It’s ironic to be watching a movie like this at a time when most of these enterprises have become legal, and sports bets in particular have become a multi-million dollar above-board business through companies like FanDuel and Draft Kings.) Mancani’s crazy enforcer is Charley Pignatelli (Forrest Tucker), who like my husband hates the diminutive of his name and insists on being called “Charles” instead.

The film was written by Hearst journalist Bob Considine, who was a big enough name he was ballyhooed on the original poster art and even with unusually prominent billing on the main credit. Considine was famous for ghost-writing autobiographies about people like General Douglas MacArthur, Captain Ted W. Lawson (one of the pilots on the famous Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, Japan in 1942), and baseball legend Babe Ruth. He was also fanatically anti-union, and when he wrote a decidedly unfavorable article on West Coast Longshoremen’s Union president Harry Bridges, Bridges told a friend, “What did you expect? He’s a Hearst man.” Considine is credited with the original story for this film and as co-author of the screenplay with Bruce Manning, who’d “made his bones” in Hollywood as writer of the early Deanna Durbin musicals One Hundred Men and a Girl, Mad About Music, That Certain Age, Three Smart Girls Grow Up, and The Amazing Mrs. Halliday. He’d also written considerably darker scripts, notably The Ninth Guest, about a group of people invited to a dinner party by a secretive host who plans to murder them one by one as part of a revenge scheme. (Manning and Gwen Bristow wrote this as a novel, The Invisible Host, in 1930; Owen Davis adapted it into a play that year, and Columbia Pictures filmed it in 1934 – all before Agatha Christie published her novel And Then There Were None (originally Ten Little Niggers, then Ten Little Indians, more recently Ten Little Soldiers) in 1939 and used the same plot gimmick.

The real central character of Hoodlum Empire is Mancani’s nephew, Joe Gray (John Russell, whose imdb.com head shot shows him in a cowboy had, reflecting Republic’s emphasis on cheap Westerns), who was a part of Mancani’s gang before he was drafted into World War II. Once he served he came out of the Army determined to “go straight” and give up his former life of crime. He’s also determined to give up his gang-moll girlfriend, Connie Williams (Claire Trevor, and it’s a delight to see her as a bad girl again after her surprisingly weak performance as the good girl in the 1946 Pat O’Brien vehicle Crack-Up). Instead he’s not only in love with but has actually married Marte Dufour (Vera Ralston, who’s been called the real-life Susan Alexander Kane because Republic studio head Herbert J. Yates made her his mistress and put her in film after film even though she was barely competent at best and downright offensive at worst; at least Hearst’s mistress, Marion Davies, had genuine talent as a light comedienne). She was originally Czech skating star Vera Hruba, and Yates added “Ralston” to her last name to make her sound American but couldn’t do anything about her accent, though at least here she’s playing a foreigner – a French Resistance fighter who literally saved Joe Gray’s life when she shot a German soldier who was about to kill him with a rifle from behind – and therefore her accent isn’t a problem. A surprisingly elaborate flashback sequence shows Gray, Stephens, army chaplain Simon Andrews (Grant Withers), and some others fighting in World War II, and this gives Gray his road-to-Damascus moment where he determines to live the rest of his life as an honest, law-abiding citizen. To that end, as soon as the war is over he settles in a small town called “Central City,” presumably in upstate New York, with Marte and has two kids with her. He also opens a gas station with a restaurant attached for long-haul truckers to get a decent meal.

One of the oddest things about Hoodlum Empire is that, for all the Right-wing associations of people like Herbert Yates (who once shut down an entire factory rather than accept a vote of his workers to unionize) and Bob Considine, it copies the multiple-flashback structure used by Left-leaning Orson Welles in the movie that dared not speak its name in Hearst’s company, Citizen Kane. Hoodlum Empire basically is a series of increasingly intense confrontations between Mancani, Pignatelli and their associates on one hand and Joe Gray and his honest business partners in the gas station on the other. Gray has been called to testify before the Stephens Committee on his knowledge of underworld activities, and Pignatelli in particular is anxious to shut him up – permanently – before that can happen. Determined both to live an honest life himself and not to rat out his uncle Mancani, Gray has pledged not to give the authorities any information about the crime syndicate his uncle runs. At one point Pignatelli tries to push Joe off the balcony of Mancani’s high-rise apartment to the street many floors below, and it’s only Mancani’s sudden order for Charlie to stop that saves Joe’s life. In order to make sure Joe doesn’t talk, Mancani and Pignatelli not only stage an invasion of slot machines into Central City – whereupon Gray’s honest co-workers beat up the gangsters sent to install them in their café – but create an elaborate frame-up so that Joe Gray appears to be the owner of the crooked slot machines and all the other gambling equipment the syndicate is bringing to town. When Simon Andrews, who was blinded by a sudden German attack in the World War II flashback, threatens to expose the frame-up to the FBI so Joe Gray will be believed after all when he testifies before the Stephens Committee, Pignatelli sends him hurtling down an elevator shaft and thereby dispatches him.

Now the only witness who can testify that Gray is not still involved in the rackets is his wife Marte, who overheard the meeting Joe had with Mancani when he dropped by their home – contradicting Mancani’s sworn testimony before the Stephens Committee that he had never visited Joe in Central City. The finale is a big shoot-out in Mancani’s apartment, in which Mancani is determined to eliminate Joe once and for all, only Joe’s ex-girlfriend Connie Williams (ya remember Connie Williams? Actually she’s been pretty inescapable throughout the movie, since she transferred her affections from Joe to Mancani once Joe became definitively unavailable to her) takes the bullet Mancani meant for Joe, and Pignatelli starts firing randomly and kills Mancani by accident as the cops arrive and take the survivors into custody. Hoodlum Empire was directed by Joseph Kane, who was mostly a director of hack Westerns but this time shows a definite eye for composition in a story set in contemporary times. Though Hoodlum Empire neither is nor pretends to be a film noir (it could have come closer if Joe had been shown as more conflicted), it’s quite well photographed by Reggie Lanning. It’s also quite well scored by composer Nathan Scott, who uses the old French folk song “Plaisir d’Amour” (best known to U.S. audiences as the source for the melody of Elvis Presley’s big hit, “Can’t Help Falling in Love with You”) as well as the usual slurpy saxophones that get constantly heard every time Lanning’s camera cranes up and shows the exterior of Mancani’s building. I was quite favorably impressed by Hoodlum Empire, and though it’s hardly a masterpiece it is a quite workmanlike piece of entertainment that deserves to be better known than it is.