Black Hand (1950)

Black Hand (1950) is a violent Italian-American historical mobster and protection racket revenge social issue thriller film noir, packed with cliché and atmosphere, and which partakes of the Italian American immigrant experience, with no-holds-barred villainous violence and later nineteenth century criminal moeurs.

Starring Gene Kelly as a hero for the good of the new country, and an immigrant who much in the style of the later Michael Corleone, vows a vengeance on the Black Hand gang that killed his father.

The historical aspect is accurate as it goes, and most notably there are scenes of pubic speaking during which the existence of the Black Hand is denied completely, something that was common to the phenomenon.

As a late period film noir, enjoying the full referent of the 1940s style, with dark street scenes, pauses in shady corridors and close up fear, the stylings of film noir are manifest and truly perfected in this movie.

The 1950s was to bring a different type of film noir however, you could almost call it lighter in tone. But Black Hand (1950) is not light in tone and neither is it light in its appearance. It's a movie of dark and crummy rooms, of crappy corners and dark places where the camera don't normally go.

There are some great moments of true tension which seem to anticipate the more realistic style of storytelling from the 1950s.

One great such example is when a bound Gene Kelly uses a cigarette held between his feet to light some dynamite when he is about to die at the hand of the Hand.

It's this kind of threat and the wicked violence of the Black Hand which makes the film such a noir hit. A silent stab in the neck is shown in shadow, accompanied by the lightest of sounds. There is banter and there is song, and there are street scenes which are straight out of The Godfather Part Two, an instantly recognisable Little Italy that is perfectly evocative of the era.

For 1950, the cliche does not descend into cruelty, although well it might. It seems that film noirs such as this did more to shape the cliches which still somehow persist, rather than partaking of them out of laziness.

Instead it seems like the style of the moment, to portray in cinema's still vaguely vaudevillian manner, some of the easy to relate to tropes which differentiate the community abroad, from the other communities its becoming a part of.

In the waning hours of Hollywood's Golden Age, when even the most saccharine of studios dared flirt with grit, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, long synonymous with Technicolor musicals and meticulously airbrushed starlets, took a detour into the shadowed alleyways of turn-of-the-century New York.

Black Hand (1950), directed with procedural detachment by Richard Thorpe, and featuring Gene Kelly in a rare non-musical role, is a film of contradictions: earnest yet stilted, formulaic yet historically provocative, and imbued with noir aesthetics while occupying the temporal realm of the historical costume drama. In its paradoxes lies its interest.

The narrative commences in the labyrinthine streets of Manhattan's Little Italy, circa 1900. Italian immigrants—most of them laborers and tradesmen—navigate a fragile existence under the looming threat of extortion from the so-called "Black Hand," a proto-Mafia organization wielding the language of fear with stiletto knives and ominous handprints. 

Roberto Columbo, played fleetingly by Peter Brocco, dares to defy the syndicate, only to find betrayal within the very institution meant to protect him. His murder, accomplished with brutal efficiency and narrative speed, reverberates throughout the film, a catalytic moment that sets the moral stakes.

Eight years later, his son Johnny (Gene Kelly), returns from Italy, the Old World having offered no respite from the trauma visited upon his family. Now an adult, bristling with purpose and fluent in both English and the argot of the tenement, Johnny is not simply a son in mourning but a vessel of intergenerational justice. 

Gene Kelly's performance, often described as miscast, in fact brings a certain cognitive dissonance that serves the character: the polished grace of a song-and-dance man turned avenger of his father, displaced into an environment that demands neither charm nor rhythm, but resolve.

What makes Black Hand especially notable is not its script—pedestrian in its construction—nor its production values, which betray its B-unit provenance, but rather its early and unusually frank invocation of the word "Mafia." 

That term, with its inescapable weight in American cultural mythology, had not yet been canonized by The Godfather (1972), a film which, tellingly, never utters it. In 1950, the word retained its European menace, a whisper from Palermo rather than a byword for American organized crime. 

The film does not aestheticize the Mafia; it renders it parasitic, preying on its own diaspora, a fact rendered all the more harrowing by the community's silence.

Though thematically modest, Black Hand is situated within a critical historical moment. The year of its release, 1950, saw the dawn of McCarthyism, the intensification of the Cold War, and the Korean conflict's outbreak. Paranoia was ambient, and institutions—whether legal, governmental, or journalistic—were interrogated and often found wanting. 

Within this broader context, Black Hand reads as a meditation on civic trust, or its absence. When Johnny seeks out the police as a young boy, his father is murdered for his faith in a corrupt system. Only years later, armed with legal training and institutional backing, does he make any headway. 

The film, then, functions as a parable for postwar American anxieties: what happens when authority is complicit, and when justice is merely procedural theater?

Visually, the film is knowledgeable with its tropes of film noir despite its period setting. Paul Vogel's cinematography casts the cobbled streets of Little Italy in hard chiaroscuro, evoking the moral ambiguities of Double Indemnity or The Killers. 

Interiors are cloaked in shadow, windows latticed with venetian blinds—a motif anachronistic to 1900 but indicative of the noir lexicon. Suspense sequences unfold in near silence, where the absence of music amplifies dread. These stylistic choices elevate the material, nudging it from pedestrian crime melodrama into something more atmospheric and, at times, haunting.

Thematically, Black Hand interrogates the tension between communal loyalty and individual justice. Johnny's return is marked not by triumphant welcome but wary glances. His love interest, Isabella Gomboli (played with tragic poise by Teresa Celli), embodies the emotional toll of a community under siege. Her reticence is not cowardice but realism. 

The threat is not hypothetical: bombs, knives, and kidnappings are meted out indiscriminately. Her younger brother Rudi, a cipher for endangered innocence, becomes a hostage in the climactic act, a human fulcrum on which moral choices pivot. 

Teresa Celli's Isabella, though the emotional core of the narrative, is largely reactive. Her agency is confined to domesticity and emotional support, her suffering made narratively productive only insofar as it motivates the male protagonist. The absence of complex female subjectivity is telling. 

The film's ethical binary—revenge versus legal redress—collapses into violence, confirming perhaps the futility of reformist idealism in a world governed by shadows.

The world of Black Hand is patriarchal in both its criminal and juridical forms. Women are either widows, victims, or romantic foils—passive witnesses to a masculine drama of justice and revenge. Their silence echoes the broader silencing of female perspectives in mid-century crime cinema.

J. Carrol Naish, cast as the Italian-American police inspector Louis Lorelli, imbues the film with gravitas. Naish, long Hollywood's go-to for ethnographic malleability, delivers a performance restrained by the standards of the time. 

His character, modelled loosely on the real-life Lt. Joseph Petrosino, lends historical ballast to the narrative. Petrosino, a pioneering NYPD officer, was assassinated in Palermo in 1909 while investigating the Mafia, a detail mirrored in Lorelli's fate. His murder, occurring offscreen in Italy, injects the film with an international dimension, implying that the Black Hand's reach extends beyond national boundaries. The implication is grim: even oceans cannot dilute the contagion of organized crime.

The climax, wherein Johnny liberates himself and Rudi from captivity and confronts Caesar Serpi (Marc Lawrence), delivers the requisite catharsis. Yet even this violent retribution is tethered to legalism. 

The crucial envelope—mailed by Lorelli prior to his murder—contains criminal records that function not as instruments of vengeance, but as bureaucratic mechanisms of deportation. This paradox, of using the law to combat lawlessness, underscores the film's ambivalence: justice is achievable, but only through a system as impersonal and slow-moving as it is fallible.

Director Richard Thorpe does not have a noir placement despite one of the longer and more illustrious of careers in The Wood. Thorpe is known as the original director of The Wizard of Oz (1939). He was fired after two weeks of shooting because it was felt that his scenes did not have the right air of fantasy about them. 

Thorpe notoriously gave Judy Garland a blonde wig and cutesy "baby-doll" makeup that made her look like a girl in her late teens rather than an innocent Kansas farm girl of about 13. Both makeup and wig were discarded at the suggestion of George Cukor, who was brought in temporarily. 

Stills from Thorpe's work on the film survive today. It is understood that his filmed footage of Toto escaping from the Wicked Witch's castle are featured in the film, albeit uncredited.

Black Hand occupies a unique position in the cultural tap-tap-tappa-tapestry of American cinema. As a precursor to more sophisticated treatments of the Mafia in films like On the Waterfront (1954), The Brotherhood (1968), and ultimately The Godfather saga, it represents an early cinematic attempt to reckon with ethnic identity, communal complicity, and systemic corruption. 

The Black Hand was the only film role for Eleonora von Mendelssohn. Besides this one role, she is also known for her marriage to the German actor Martin Kosleck in 1947, which was unexpected at the time In 1951, Eleonora von Mendelssohn took her own life.

Eleonora von Mendelssohn playing Maria Columbo is quite a terrifying and powerful performance even without knowing that, but knowing that it makes these scenes harder still. Hence the filing under suicide in film noir.

But it does so within the constraints of its time: rigid moral dichotomies, limited character development, and an unwillingness to delve into the sociopolitical nuances of organized crime. Its greatest innovation may be its historical setting, which allows it to approach the topic with a measure of allegorical distance.

Viewed within the arc of American history, Black Hand dramatizes a moment of transition. The early twentieth century marked the transformation of immigrant populations from insular enclaves into assimilated citizens, often through the crucible of adversity. 

The film, in its own sentimental and simplified way, charts this passage. Johnny Columbo, returning from Italy, straddles two worlds: one of vendetta and one of legal rationalism. His journey is that of the American immigrant myth itself—through violence and struggle to institutional legitimacy. That this journey must be paved with the blood of friends and the betrayal of neighbours only heightens the cost of assimilation.

The film is, in the final analysis, a noir not of style alone, but of ideology. Its central premise—that even the innocent must navigate systems tainted by complicity and fear—is pure noir. 

The streets may be lit by gaslight instead of neon, and the costumes may evoke Ellis Island rather than Sunset Boulevard, but the existential dread is the same. Trust is a liability, justice a deferred promise, and love a luxury few can afford.

That Black Hand remains relatively obscure in the annals of crime cinema is unsurprising. It lacks the operatic grandeur of later Mafia epics and the narrative tightness of the best noirs. Yet its modest ambitions yield unexpected resonance. It reminds us that the machinery of justice, like that of crime, is peopled by fallible men—men who love, grieve, betray, and sometimes, improbably, prevail.

In a cinematic age increasingly allergic to ambiguity, Black Hand offers a vision of justice forged not in certainty but in compromise. Its ending is not triumphant but weary. 

The victory is Pyrrhic, the losses irrevocable. In this, the film finds its truest noir voice: not in shadows and gunplay, but in the knowledge that the past, however avenged, remains indelible.

Black Hand (1950)

Directed by Richard Thorpe

Genres - Crime, Drama, Thriller  |   Sub-Genres - Film Noir, Gangster Film, Historical Film  |   Release Date - Mar 11, 1950  |   Run Time - 92 min. | Wikipedia