(1948)2.5Bruce EderJohn Reinhardt's Open Secret is a highly underrated movie, dealing with post-World War II anti-Semitism. In terms of production values and even the scope of its script, it pales next to Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement -- but on another level, it succeeds where Gentleman's Agreement fails. The Kazan movie, for all of its good intentions, seldom addresses the working-class side of anti-Semitism. Apart from the one scene in the restaurant in which a drunken patron nearly provokes a fight with the character played by John Garfield, the side of life addressed by Kazan's movie is mostly confined to the educated and elite classes, in decidedly upper-middle-class and upscale parts of New York. Open Secret, by contrast, addresses anti-Semitism at the level of the street, where push can not only come to shove, but to much more dire consequences. In many ways, the plot is an extension of (and almost a sequel to) the 1930s Warner Bros. drama Black Legion: It's story set in an industrial town, among lower-class factory workers and merchants who get pulled into acts of violence, sometimes knowingly and other times against their best judgment. Even the backstory about the character whose fate starts the plot rolling -- a factory worker who resented being moved to a shift and section in which he was only working with "foreigners" -- recalls Black Legion. In addition to covering a class of Americans that Kazan's movie (but not Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire) virtually ignores, Open Secret is also unusual in raising the spectre of a new, virulent breed of postwar anti-Semitism, where most of the bigotry depicted in Kazan's movies is old-line and long-established. Open Secret focused on the fact that, among the working classes, there was resentment over the postwar revelations about German treatment of the Jews and the sympathy evoked. As more than one character points out, there have been Jews and other "foreigners" living there a long time without trouble -- only now they are increasingly under siege.
The movie has the structure and the elements of film noir, and was presented as a mystery and marketed as a crime movie -- it also has numerous flaws in its structure, an inevitable result of a low budget, quick shooting schedule, and short running time, as well as the need to maintain the structure and pacing of a thriller. The string of violent confrontations at the denouement seem unrealistic, but amid that and other problems with the movie are some compelling elements, mostly embodied in the character of Harry Strauss (George Tyne), the good-natured, working-class Jew who can't understand what has happened to the town in which he was born and lived his whole life, and to the people around him; and Sheldon Leonard's Detective Frontelli, another man of immigrant stock, is also at a loss as to what to do about the violence and vandalism that has swept over his town. Both men find their concerns and their actions enabled by their contact with Paul Lester (John Ireland), a decent, two-fisted, regular joe who, like his vanished friend Stevens (Charles Waldron Jr.), knows when he sees something wrong. In later years and other movies, it would be the Strausses and the Frontellis that would act on their own, but in its time, Open Secret had to be structured in this way as a plea for reconciliation.
Photographer Paul Lester (John Ireland) and his wife, Nancy (Jane Randolph), are invited to share an apartment with Paul's ex-army buddy Ed Stevens. They arrive to find Stevens gone, and a mysterious phone call gets Paul to the other end of town. While he's away, Nancy is assaulted by a would-be burglar. Paul thinks there's something more going on than a missing persons case or a burglary and tries to interest Detective Frontelli (Sheldon Leonard) of the police department in looking into it, but Frontelli is initially skeptical. When Stevens turns up under the wheels of a truck along with evidence tying him to an earlier hit-and-run murder, Paul is certain that there's some kind of organized conspiracy afoot. What he finds is a town slowly coming under siege from a secret band of anti-Semitic thugs masquerading as a patriotic organization, with whom Stevens had been involved and tried to quit. Paul and Nancy's situation goes from bad to dangerous when they accidentally stumble upon evidence that could hang the murderers.
