The FBI Story

Another of those movies that has been sitting on my DVR for some time is the James Stewart movie The FBI Story. Recently, I sat down to watch it and do a review on it here.

As you can probably guess, this movie is a story about the US Federal Bureau of Investigations. James Stewart plays Chip Hardesty, a career FBI agent who at the start of the movie is giving a lecture to a bunch of FBI agents about the history of the agency, starting from a relatively recent case in which a disgruntled man (Nick Adams) plants a bomb in his mother's luggage for her to take on a plane, with him taking out one of those airport insurance policies on her. The plane explodes, killing everybody on board, but the diligent FBI puts all the evidence together and captures the bomber.

It's only at ths point that we finally meet Chip in the flesh, as he takes the story back to 1924, and the time that J. Edgar Hoover (briefly playing himself) is named to head the agency. Hoover wasn't the first head; he was just the extremely long-serving head who eventually used the agency for his own political aims, just like other heads before him did, and heads after him, continuing right up to this day. But in 1959 when the movie was released, there was no way a Hollywood movie would say one cross word about Hoover or the FBI as a whole. Chip is working in the agency's office in Knoxville, TN, together with his friend Sam Crandall (Murry Hamilton) when they get word to head off to Washington where they find out about the reorganization of the agency along more professional lines.

Chip already has a girlfriend in local librarian Lucy (Vera Miles), and not being certain about what he's going to do with his career, he decides to get married to her before they have to go off to Washington, at which time he's already thinking about giving up his career. However, he's convinced to stay on, something which should have been obvious since the opening scene had him late in his career giving that lecture. Along the way, Chip and Lucy have a son and two daughters, and parts of their personal story are interspersed with Chip's professional life.

The professional life is episodic, with another five crime stories being told:
First, Chip and Sam get sent down south to deal with the Ku Klux Klan, although the Klan as seen here only threatens a white newspaper publisher rather than threatening any bloack people.
After that, Chip goes to 1920s Oklahoma, where somebody's killing a bunch of Indians who hold oil royalties. We see how the FBI has a bunch of records on various types of typewriters, something that would become a staple in later movies like Jagged Edge or Misery.
By the time we get to the 1930s, the gangsters are a big thing, and the fact that FBI agents are not armed is a problem. Some, like Lucy, however, worry that arming them will make them a bigger target, as the gangsters will be more likely to shoot instead of getting shot by an armed agent. Indeed, poor Sam gets killed.
Then we get to 1941, when Chip's daughter has an Honor Society meeting around noon on a Sunday, telegraphing things that this is December 7 and the US is going to get into World War II. Chip's son joins the Marines, while Chip goes to South America to check on those agents who are spying on the Nazis, the OSS (forerunner to the CIA) not yet being a thing. One of those agents is Sam's son George.
Finally, after the war, the Communists become the bad guys and Chip solves the case of a half-dollar that has some microfilm inside.

The FBI Story, having been personally approved by J. Edgar Hoover, is pure propaganda, and a lot of people will probably be quick to pan the movie because of what we now know about J. Edgar Hoover. However, it should be remembered that the FBI, along with the spy agencies that would be formed out of World War II and later, have always been inherently political, as all government is. And a lot of the people who hate J. Edgar Hoover would probably praise the FBI and the other three-letter agencies for their actions over the past five years going after the Trump admistration stemming from the obviously bullshit Christopher Steele dossier. (This isn't to speak well of the Trump administraion, but more to point out the incredible number of Will Ropers who are happy to set up government agencies that are going to spin out of control because they think some individual is evil.)

Being a mostly episodic movie, at least in terms of the crimes presented, it becomes a lot easier to look at The FBI Story in the same light that one might look at any police show, be it from the 1950s or still from today, and how much deference the police are still given in shows like the Law & Order franchise. (But dammit, they're going after the right people! Not people who allow us to turn policing into a racial issue!) The various episodes presented in The FBI Story could in fact fit in with almost any police show from the past 60-plus years, in that they're not badly executed, even if they are in service of propaganda. With a star like James Stewart and a director like Mervyn LeRoy, should one expect any less?

So The FBI Story is an interesting historical document if you will, albeit one that will probably frustrate a lot of people. One only wishes it would lead people to become frustrated with journalism's propagandistic treatment of the three-letter agencies of today.