T-Men

T-Men

1947: Anthony Mann, director; starring Dennis O’Keefe, Mary Meade, Alfred Ryder. A movie studied in film schools for its use of expressive black-and-white noir techniques and a semi-documentary style that presaged cinema verite. It is notable in that the stars are not J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men, but instead the Treasury Department’s so-called T-Men, who lacked Hoover’s full-throated marketing and were not as popularly mythologized although they had a bigger impact on bringing down the Mob.