Walk East on Beacon ** (1952, George Murphy, Finlay Currie, Virginia Gilmore) – Classic Movie Review 12,748

The ‘Red threat’ of the Fifties was the main motivating influence – as well as J Edgar Hoover – behind the smooth 1952 Columbia Pictures drama thriller film Walk East on Beacon about the FBI hunting down Communist spies.

Filmed in a semi-documentary style, it has not worn too well, but George Murphy, Finlay Currie and Virginia Gilmore play it for all it is worth.

George Murphy stars as Federal agent Jim Belden, assigned to locate the Communist mastermind behind a leak, and to trace all Communist access to information. Finlay Currie plays Professor Albert Kafer, the space weapons scientist being forced into Communist co-operating as his son is under threat. Karel Stepanek also appears as the top Eastern Block spy Alexi Laschenkov. And future star director George Roy Hill appears as an actor (playing Nicholas Wilben)!

It is similar to producer Louis de Rochemont’s earlier Reds-under-the-bed thriller, The House on 92nd Street.

Also in the cast are Karel Stepanek, Louisa Horton, Peter Capell, Bruno Wick and Karl Weber.

Leo Rosten’s screenplay is inspired by J Edgar Hoover’s May 1951 Reader’s Digest article The Crime of the Century: The Case of the A-Bomb Spies about the meeting of German physicist and atomic spy Klaus Fuchs and American chemist Harry Gold, giving details of the Soviet espionage network in the US. Gold’s testimony led to the treason case against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. However, the film substitutes real-life atomic spying with invented vague top secret scientific programmes.

Location work was shot in New England, around Washington Union Station, and in FBI laboratories.

Walk East on Beacon [The Crime of the Century] is directed by Alfred L Werker, runs 98 minutes, is made and released by Columbia Pictures, is written by Leo Rosten, is shot in black and white by Joseph C Brun, and scored by Jack Shaindlin and Louis Applebaum (uncredited).

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,748

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