An early film noir from the maker of the genre classic Gun Crazy (1949), The Undercover Man gets past a somewhat weak script with good acting and even better direction. Given his budget and the material at hand, director Joseph H. Lewis had to let some slightly flaccid moments through, but he keeps the action moving so briskly that one hardly notices them, and with Glenn Ford's less-is-more style of acting, he's got the perfect leading man through whom to take that approach -- even the scenes with Nina Foch as Ford's wife (and her character earns points for being the most patient, understanding hero's wife that one will ever find in a movie such as this) play well, and realistically. But it's the action scenes, and the confrontations that drive this movie, whether it's Ford's Frank Warren trying to make contact with a potential stoolie who's almost as evasive as the criminals he's informing on, or a would-be witness (Anthony Caruso) running from the assassins sent to kill him down a crowded street in a tenement neighborhood while his little girl cries out after him. Those sequences, and a number of tense confrontations with crooked lawyers and corrupted cops, and cops who have paid a price for not being corrupted, keep this film moving at a good clip and get us to the payoff, which is surprisingly satisfying even though it mostly happens in a courtroom. The Undercover Man isn't the best film noir ever done, or even one of the best movies made by Lewis, but as a meat-and-potatoes genre film, it's a great way to spend 90 minutes, and it's also a great showcase for Ford and most of the rest of the cast.