The Captive City

The Captive City is a 1952 film, considered film noir, directed by Robert Wise. John Forsythe plays a crusading small city newspaper editor in a semidocumentary depiction of corruption and vice in paranoid post-World War II America. This is one of several 1950s films to have storylines influenced by the Kefauver Committee's investigation of organized crime. Senator Estes Kefauver appears as himself. The film is based on experiences of Time magazine reporter Alvin Josephy, Jr., who co-wrote the script. As newspaper editor Jim Austin prepares his testimony before the Committee, the story... flashes back to the events which led to his testifying. Mob boss Murray Sirak has the entire police force of Austin's small town under his thumb. Sirak takes his orders from an unseen "untouchable" Mister Big. Austin is driven to investigate corruption after Clyde Nelson, a local private detective, working on an apparently harmless divorce case, discovers the existence of a big-time gambling syndicate operating with the consent of the city fathers, the local police, and the respectable elements of the community. Nelson is killed in a hit-and-run which appears to be an accident.
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