This depressing, yet beautifully made, crime story is the most socially conscious noir of the 1940s. In classic noir, downfalls are almost always due to either an episode of fate or a weak person who plays with fire. Bad luck, bad decisions, hard times. Here though, Marxist writer/director Abraham Polonsky takes a different approach in that he’s critical of the entire system of wealth and power and the exploitation of underclasses that often goes along with it. He uses the New York City numbers racket—a kind of lottery, except with less-than-legal private gambling—as a symbol of American capitalism as a whole. We see the rubes who place their bets, the crooks who run the show and manipulate the results, the low-level bookies and the lawyers who figure how to keep it all above water. To do that, Polonsky lays a lot of talk on us, maybe a little too much sometimes. Two things save the film: John Garfield, giving his best performance as a mob attorney who hasn’t completely lost his heart and who never makes Polonsky’s writing sound preachy; and great on-location photography of New York City. In the most impressive moments, the camera stands back, makes the characters small and the city huge and, through Polonsky’s eye, oppressive. This is a political film if you want that, but it also fits in with other crime films of the time. After all, noir as a rule is pessimistic about everything. I can’t think of any film in the genre that actually celebrates capitalism (or celebrates much of anything else). In noir, all money is dirty. The difference here is that Abraham Polonsky cares more about the dirt than the dollar.