711 Ocean Drive (Frank Seltzer Productions, Essaness Pictures Corporation, Columbia, 1950)

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

Two nights ago (Saturday, April 25) I watched an Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” presentation on Turner Classic Movies: 711 Ocean Drive, directed by Joseph M. Newman (quite effectively) from a script by Richard English and Francis Swann, and starring Edmond O’Brien in what Eddle Muller said was his first starring role. (It wasn’t; that was D.O.A., made a year earlier and an even better movie than this one as well as one closer to the noir world.) The publicity for 711 Ocean Drive (an address I don’t remember hearing in the film itself, though it was presumably the headquarters of “Liberty Finance,” the above-board business the ring of bookmakers at the center of the story use as cover) emphasized the actual danger the filmmakers were in – or at least said they were in – by exposing secrets of gangland the gangsters didn’t want you to know. The opening prologue of 711 Ocean Drive expresses this: “Because of the disclosures made in this film, powerful underworld interests tried to halt production with threats of violence and reprisal. It was only through the armed protection provided by members of the Police Department in the locales where the picture was filmed, that this story was able to reach the screen. To these men, and to the U.S. Rangers at Boulder Dam, we are deeply grateful.” The film starts with its protagonist, Mal Granger (Edmond O’Brien), being chased by police detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Gangster Squad (which frequently used extra-legal tactics of their own to keep organized criminals, especially ones from other cities, out of town). One of the cops, Lt. Pete Wright (Howard St. John), tells his partner, who’s asked what Granger is wanted for, “Murder,” leaving us in suspense as to whom Granger is supposed to have killed, let alone why.

Then all is explained in a flashback that takes up the bulk of the film: when the story began Granger was just a lowly proletarian at the local telephone company. But he’d served in World War II and thereby gained an impressive knowledge of electronics. Granger also likes to place a few small-scale bets with the local bookies, one of whom recruits him for the gang. Using his knowledge of electronic gear, Granger sets up a system that vastly improves the gang’s ability to collect horse-racing results from tracks all over the country, including a marvelous rig that essentially turns the gang representative’s body and the fence surrounding the track into a transmitter. The boss of the gang is Vince Walters (Barry Kelley), until he makes the mistake of putting too strong a strong-arm on one of the bookies. The bookie shoots him dead and then kills himself, and Granger takes advantage of this opportunity to take over the bookmaking racket. Meanwhile, members of a national crime syndicate based in Cleveland notice how much money Granger’s operation is making while they’re not getting a dime from it. They decide to remedy this situation by moving out to California, setting up their own operation, and either bribing or intimidating Granger to sell out to them. Granger is all too willing to sell out his old comrades, especially once he meets the Mob’s point man for the deal, Larry Mason (Don Porter). Granger has also been working himself up in the sex-partner department, first dumping his honest proletarian girlfriend who wanted him to marry her and make a decent, industrious living at the phone company even though neither of them would have much money or any dreams of making any. He briefly takes up with Trudy Maxwell (Dorothy Patrick), business manager for his gang, before dumping her and forming an extra-relational crush on Mason’s hot young trophy wife, Gail Mason (Joanne Dru, who reportedly loved making this movie because until then she’d only played sympathetic roles and she loved getting her first crack at a villainess).

Most of the film takes place in the L.A. area, but there were a few run-ins to Palm Springs and a finale that takes place at the gigantic structure alternately called Hoover Dam and Boulder Dam. (Hoover Dam was originally authorized in 1931, when its namesake, Herbert Hoover, was President. It was finished in 1937, during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration, and Roosevelt insisted on unilaterally renaming it Boulder Dam. In 1947, two years after Roosevelt’s death and with the Republicans in control of Congress for the first time since 1929, they passed a law re-renaming it Hoover Dam, though this film, made three years after that, still calls it “Boulder Dam.”) Granger gets into big trouble when he first hires a hit man, Gizzi (Robert Osterloh, who apparently made a specialty of slimy subordinate villains like this), to knock off Gail’s inconvenient husband, then has to kill Gizzi himself by ramming him off the Santa Monica Pier after Gizzi tries to blackmail Granger into a percentage of his operation. The film’s climax takes place at the Hoover/Boulder Dam, where there’s an exciting chase scene between Granger and the L.A. police, who have an extradition agreement with the state of Nevada but not with Arizona. The idea is if Granger can escape, either with or without Gail, from Nevada to Arizona they’ll be able to take a plane to Guatemala, which doesn’t (or at least didn’t in 1950) have an extradition treaty with the U.S. at all, and enjoy their ill-gotten gains in peace. Only the police track down Granger as soon as he breaks free from the tour group that’s being led around the dam, and shoot and apparently kill him before he can make it to Arizona.

711 Ocean Drive isn’t really a film noir: the good guys are all good, the bad guys are all bad, and only Joanne Dru’s character is genuinely conflicted between the two. But it is a well-structured crime thriller and it often seemed to me like an updated version of Little Caesar from 20 years earlier. Remember that in his autobiography, Edward G. Robinson described his character of Enrico Caesar Bandello as a striver, a young man on the make trying to get ahead and finding by a combination of personal quirks and economic circumstances that the only route for advancement available to him is crime. Like Little Caesar, Mal Granger is a basically decent, hard-working sort at first who’s tempted by the riches and social position offered by the criminal lifestyle. The film is well structured in showing off Mal’s gradual moral deterioration until he’s literally knocking off other people to fulfill his own survival as well as his romantic/sexual desires. Eddie Muller said he met Joseph M. Newman at a screening of 711 Ocean Drive he organized, and he said Newman was a down-to-earth guy who probably never made it to the upper echelons of directing precisely because he wasn’t a pushy blow-your-own-horn type. Muller also disparaged what’s probably Newman’s best-known film, the 1955 science-fiction thriller This Island Earth, as “campy” – which disappointed Charles and I because both of us like the film considerably better than that. Despite its flaws, This Island Earth is a quite good movie and, ironically, considerably more progressive politically than Raymond F. Jones’s source novel. Jones wrote what was essentially a Cold War parable in science-fiction terms while the screenwriters, Franklin Coen and George Callahan, turned it into a surprisingly radical (for 1955) anti-war film.