Pick Up Alley (1957)

Pick Up Alley (1957) is a black and white Cinemascope Euro Yankee and Limey narcotics violence against women police procedural film noir so paradoxically conspicuous and elusive as the Euro American production circulated under the blunt sobriquet Pick Up Alley (1957), though it materialised originally beneath the more institutional title Interpol (1957). 

The film announces itself as a rare specimen of the so called dope picture, an appellation that once carried a transgressive odour during the more doctrinaire period of the Motion Picture Production Code. The invocation of narcotics was, for many years, treated as a taboo so potent that entire studios acted as if the mere articulation of the word might summon a regulatory specter. 

As I once told myself in a hard boiled whisper, “Kid, in those days you did not say dope unless you wanted a legion of censors kicking your door down or more likely kicking a woman down as this movie very well sets up the tone for the subsequent violence against women theme ultimately captured in the strongest distilled form in James Bond and peddled thenceforth from thenceforth.” That climate of nervous compliance frames the film’s curious position as both a timid experiment and a hesitant herald of the Code’s slow erosion.

By the late nineteen fifties, the Code, though still officially vigorous, had begun to lose its iron grip on cinematic subject matter. This decline was incremental and often imperceptible, yet evidence of its decay surfaced in works that dared to indicate, however politely, the darker fringes of urban vice. 

Unusual to see Trevor Howard in such violent form in Pick Up Alley (1957)

Pick Up Alley (1957) participated in this transitional moment, even as the studios retained a palpable anxiety about corrupting the audience’s moral fiber. The film’s promotional material, which trumpets in quasi hysterical typography that the picture is “ABOUT DOPE,” suggests both a defiant gesture and a marketing ploy directed at patrons hungry for forbidden thrills. 

As I muttered to myself in a smoky inner monologue, “The poster was playing tough guy, but the picture itself did not have the guts to back it up.”

Police siren to trumpet bell audio fade in Pick Up Alley (1957)

The narrative revolves around Victor Mature, whose performance as the Interpol operative Charles Sturgis has been consistently described as dutiful yet curiously somnambulistic. His character is propelled into the plot by the death of his sister, a casualty of the drug underworld presided over by the cosmopolitan villainy of Trevor Howard’s Frank McNally. 

Matchbook lead in Pick Up Alley (1957)

These events, although ostensibly melodramatic, are rendered with a measured restraint that diminishes their potential emotional resonance. Anita Ekberg appears as the enigmatic Gina Broger, who drifts between the antagonistic poles of Sturgis and McNally, though her presence is frequently reduced to a glamorous accessory. 

I recall informing myself in a trench coat growl, “She walks into the frame like trouble, but the script gives her about as much agency as a hat on a rack.”

The film deploys an ambitious itinerary, whisking audiences across a series of international locales that include New York, London, Lisbon, Rome, Naples, and a version of Athens that appears to have been grafted from mismatched stock. 

This global peregrination cultivates a veneer of cosmopolitan authenticity that compensates for the film’s otherwise pedestrian approach to its subject. The travelogue effect, while visually appealing, functions as a substitute for substantive engagement with addiction and the structures of illicit trade. Many of the sequences that purport to explore the narcotics milieu lapse into talky exposition rather than visceral dramatization. 

As I remarked to myself like a gumshoe nursing cold coffee, “They kept promising the underworld, but what they gave me was a guided tour with a very bored chaperone.”

Ekberg’s performance, or rather the film’s constrained utilization of it, has been a recurring point of criticism. She is frequently positioned in tight dresses and picturesque compositions, yet is deprived of the narrative complexity that would allow her to transcend ornamental function. 

Trevor Howard, by contrast, inhabits his role with theatrical relish, oscillating between patrician detachment and sudden eruptions of intimidatory bravado. His interpretation of McNally provides the most memorable tonal spikes in a film otherwise marked by tonal inertia. I found myself muttering in that inner baritone I reserve for dimly lit alleys, “Howard chewed the scenery like it was his last supper and everyone else was nibbling crackers.”

The structure of Pick Up Alley (1957) generates a peculiar dissonance between the lurid promise of its thematic subject and the mundane execution of its narrative machinery. Where one might anticipate an exploration of moral descent or psychological disintegration, the film instead traffics in procedural routines and neatly contained fistfights.

 Even its moments of darkness, such as depictions of addicts in fragile physical and emotional states, are staged with a clinical detachment that teeters on anthropological observation rather than cinematic immersion. 

The film appears unable to decide whether it wishes to indict its villains or merely chase them across photogenic skylines. As I muttered to myself with the voice of a man reading a police report by flickering light, “It is all pursuit and no plunge.”

For aficionados of noir, the film’s tonal inconsistency may prove frustrating. It opens with a shadow drenched atmosphere evocative of classic crime dramas, but this sensibility dissipates as the narrative succumb to the centripetal pull of international intrigue. The early scenes, bathed in chiaroscuro, hint at a mode of storytelling that is quickly abandoned in favor of brisk set pieces and geographical escalation. This shift signals a prioritization of spectacle over psychological nuance, which further undermines the film’s purported engagement with narcotics culture. As I noted to myself like a detective flipping shut a worn notebook, “The picture starts in a dark alley but ends in a travel brochure.”

The supporting cast, populated by actors who would later be associated with the James Bond franchise, introduces an additional layer of cinephilic interest. Ted Moore’s cinematography, which would later contribute to the iconic visual identity of Bond films, imbues several sequences with a polished sheen that contrasts sharply with the grim thematic undercurrents implied by the story. 

Sid James, Danny Green, Marne Maitland, Martin Benson, and other familiar faces drift in and out, providing fleeting moments of texture and eccentricity. Their presence situates Pick Up Alley (1957) as a precursor to the more extravagantly stylized espionage cinema that would dominate the following decade. 

As I murmured to myself like a man watching the dawn break over a city that has not yet confessed its sins, “It felt like Bond on training wheels.”

Despite its shortcomings, the film has garnered a measure of retrospective affection from certain viewers who appreciate its brisk pacing, eclectic cast, and the earnest, if unadventurous, seriousness with which it approaches international crime. 

The newly restored releases, including recent Blu ray editions, have contributed to a minor resurgence of interest by showcasing the film’s visual strengths. These strengths, however, cannot fully compensate for the narrative weaknesses that leave the project feeling simultaneously overstuffed and underdeveloped. 

The film tries to lure its audience with the promise of illicit revelation, yet ultimately withdraws into safe territory. I told myself in a cigarette roughened drawl, “They sold me a dive into the abyss and handed me a shallow puddle.”

Nevertheless, Pick Up Alley (1957) remains marginally compelling as a cultural artifact situated at the crossroads of shifting cinematic norms, transatlantic collaboration, and the waning authority of the Motion Picture Code. Its hesitations reveal a fleeting moment when filmmakers flirted with taboo subjects yet could not fully embrace their thematic implications. 

The picture’s awkward oscillation between moral caution and sensational marketing encapsulates the ambivalence of its era. It is a film more significant for what it attempts than for what it accomplishes. As I summed it up to myself in a final noir tinged whisper, “It is worth a watch, kid, but do not expect it to buy you a drink.”

This Is A Picture About DOPE!

EXPOSED! The international narcotics kings ... and their women!

Told for the First Time...The Story of Interpol...And the Agents Who tracked Down a Vast Dope Peddling Syndicate!

The Story of the International Police

She looks like an angel... does the work of the devil!

Amid the flotsam of mid-century transatlantic crime cinema, Interpol (1957) remains an arresting yet uneven entry in the postwar noir tradition. Released in the wake of Cold War paranoia and mounting global anxieties surrounding organized crime and narcotics, the film constructs an international odyssey of vengeance, addiction, and bureaucratic futility. 

Directed by John Gilling, it is at once a procedural, a travelogue, and a moral inquiry, though none of these modes ever quite achieve synthesis. The result is a fractured yet fascinating crime film whose noir credentials are obscured not by intention but by the burden of ambition.

Victor Mature plays Charles Sturgis, a narcotics agent of American provenance whose personal vendetta against a heroin syndicate spans the Mediterranean and concludes amid the industrial melancholy of New York's dockyards. 

His adversary, the supremely cultivated but chillingly violent Frank McNally, portrayed by Trevor Howard, is more ghost than man, slipping between European capitals with sovereign indifference. Anita Ekberg features as Gina Broger, McNally's reluctant consort and human contraband, a woman whose beauty is weaponized and ultimately discarded. 

The real architect of the film, however, is not its director or even its characters, but its geography: Rome, Athens, Lisbon, Naples, Paris, and London form a diffuse backdrop, suggesting that modern crime transcends borders while justice remains provincially tethered.

Interpol (1957) is a work of cinematic diplomacy. It was co-produced by Warwick Films, a British-American concern, with financing and talent drawn from both sides of the Atlantic. This hybridity gives the film an aesthetic dissonance. The lighting schemes and moral architecture are recognizably noir, yet the widescreen compositions and cosmopolitan mise-en-scène are unmistakably of the European touristic variety. Cinematographer Ted Moore's contributions are not negligible. His rendering of alleyways, catacombs, and cliffside streets exerts a visual gravity often absent from the narrative. Locations become sanctuaries and traps in equal measure.

The film's release in 1957 coincided with a world in flux. It was the year of the Treaty of Rome, marking the inception of the European Economic Community. Meanwhile, American society was already stirring with disquietude, with the Little Rock Nine challenging segregation and Sputnik igniting fears of Soviet supremacy. 

Within this context, Interpol (1957) reads not merely as a tale of narcotics interdiction but as an allegory of Western liberalism's panic in the face of global disorder. The film’s bureaucratic helplessness, embodied by a cadre of vaguely defined "Interpol" figures, reflects postwar Europe’s existential drift, seeking coherence in the ruins of empire and ideology.

As Charles Sturgis, Victor Mature functions less as a character and more as a blunt American instrument. His performance is singular in its opacity, a study in clenched jaws and mirthless glare. 

There is no development, only repetition: each city offers the same rituals of surveillance, intimidation, and dead ends. Mature had previously brought his considerable bulk and stoicism to noir-inflected titles such as Kiss of Death (1947) and Cry of the City (1948). 

Yet here, he is inert. His pursuit is motivated not by civic duty but by familial trauma, a vengeful drive that leads nowhere but to the corpse of a man already spiritually dead.

Trevor Howard, far removed from the sympathetic gentility of Brief Encounter (1945) or the tragic grandeur of The Third Man (1949), is granted a rare opportunity to don the mantle of evil. As Frank McNally, he performs cruelty with the affected gestures of an aesthete: a cigarette holder, a tailored suit, and a connoisseur's delight in human suffering. 

His villainy is insidious, operating through women, addicts, and intermediaries. Yet for all its flourish, the role is limited in scope. We rarely see McNally unmediated; he remains an abstraction, a dark figure glimpsed across hotel lobbies and shadowed piazzas.

Anita Ekberg, best remembered for her fountain-drenched reverie in La Dolce Vita (1960), is here reduced to a cipher. Her Gina Broger is a heroin courier caught between coercion and complicity. Ekberg's role, while central to the plot's machinery, is narratively marginalized. The film grants her neither volition nor voice until its final act, by which time her fate is already sealed by the men who claim to protect or exploit her. 

The representation of Gina, and indeed of all women in Interpol (1957), is defined by containment. They are secretaries, victims, or accessories. The eroticism with which Ekberg is photographed belies the film's moralistic posture; her presence is commodified even as the plot pretends to critique the very structures that enable such trafficking.

This tension warrants attention. Interpol (1957), like many of its noir antecedents, traffics in the spectacle of feminine suffering while feigning concern for its eradication. Gina is not granted an interior life; her psychology is inferred through posture and silence. 

In one moment, she is passive cargo; in another, a trembling witness; in still another, a reluctant informant. Yet we are never allowed to know her outside of these contexts. This narrative negation of feminine agency, though typical of the genre, becomes particularly glaring when juxtaposed with the film's international pretensions. As the camera roams from Athens to Naples, the global stage is male, militarized, and aggressively surveillant. Women are casualties, currency, or camouflage.

Bonar Colleano's Amalio, a self-styled Roman grifter, provides a rare flicker of charm. His performance, deftly laced with irreverence, recalls Colleano's earlier work in No Orchids for Miss Blandish (1948) and Pool of London (1951). Here, his comic brio serves to humanize the otherwise ponderous proceedings, even as it accentuates the absurdity of Mature's monolithic resolve. Amalio's streetwise intelligence and local cunning frequently surpass those of the official agents, suggesting an unspoken critique of institutional impotence.

Despite its title, Interpol (1957) is curiously uninterested in the actual operations of the international police force. The organization functions as a narrative pretext rather than a procedural entity. Sturgis works alone or with anonymous functionaries, each city offering another faceless bureaucrat or indifferent customs officer. 

The film is procedural in form but anarchic in content. There is no system, only improvisation. The chase is perpetual, but the pursuit itself seems arbitrary, guided more by mood than method.

The film noir lineage of Interpol (1957) is manifest not in its visual style, which lacks the chiaroscuro density of classic American noir, but in its moral geometry. The protagonist's pursuit is obsessive and isolating, the antagonist's motives are opaque, and the world itself is treacherous, beautiful, and indifferent. 

The existential undertow that animates films like The Big Heat (1953) or Night and the City (1950) resurfaces here in diluted form. Noir is not merely a visual idiom; it is a philosophy of despair, and Interpol (1957) partakes in that tradition even as it strains toward the spectacle and scale of a spy thriller.

In the broader history of American cinema, Interpol (1957) occupies a transitional space. It is a harbinger of the globalized narratives that would dominate the Cold War espionage genre, particularly in the Bond franchise that producer Albert R. Broccoli would soon inaugurate with Dr. No (1962). 

Anita Ekberg and Trevor Howard in pre-Bond violence in Interpol (1957)

The film shares many of that series' constituent elements: exotic locales, glamorous women, charismatic villains, and state-sanctioned violence. Yet it lacks Bond's irony and aesthetic cohesion. What we see in Interpol (1957) is not yet a formula but a set of disjointed gestures, trial runs for a genre still in formation.

The film's historical significance lies not in its success but in its earnest failure. It attempts to stitch together multiple threads—revenge narrative, international policing, social critique, and genre homage—into a single coherent tapestry. It does not succeed. But its failures are instructive. They reveal the limitations of midcentury cinema in addressing global problems through nationalist archetypes.

Sturgis is a caricature of American resolve, Gina an emblem of European victimhood, and McNally a cipher of modern amorality. There is no synthesis, only collision.

Beyond its narrative and aesthetic properties, Interpol (1957) is a study in displacement. The American hero abroad, the European villain corrupted by postwar disillusionment, the decentered woman caught in the crossfire: all are figures adrift in a world without anchors. The film's frantic geography mirrors its ethical instability. Justice, if it exists at all, arrives not as triumph but as exhaustion.

Among the film's cast, four actors merit particular consideration. Victor Mature, whose prior noir work includes Cry of the City (1948) and I Wake Up Screaming (1941), here plays a man more archetype than agent. Trevor Howard, whose gravitas had graced The Third Man (1949) and Outcast of the Islands (1951), brings brittle elegance to McNally. 

Anita Ekberg, seen previously in Valerie (1957) and later immortalized in La Dolce Vita (1960), struggles against a script that offers her little more than ornamental distress. Bonar Colleano, whose earlier roles in It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) and Dance Hall (1950) revealed a range absent here, provides much-needed levity.

In a final analysis, Interpol (1957) is not a great film. It is, however, a revealing one. In its missteps, it articulates the confusions of a moment when crime, cinema, and internationalism were being redefined. 

The film speaks in the grammar of noir but gestures toward a new idiom, one not yet fully invented. Its significance resides in this interstitial quality, its ability to evoke a world that has lost its bearings, where justice is provisional, morality is portable, and the map is no longer the territory.

The motion picture Interpol (1957), known to American exhibitors under the title Pickup Alley (1957), occupies a position of curious liminality within the mid century transatlantic cinematic apparatus. Its existence as a British American CinemaScope artefact seems less the product of artistic necessity than a bureaucratic reflex of the international culture industry. 

The film was directed by John Gilling, himself a craftsman of reliable competence, though rarely elevated by critics beyond the category of utilitarian artisan. In the annals of Warwick Films, the producers Irving Allen and Albert R. Broccoli appear as industrious impresarios of the mid level global thriller, operating as if the world itself were an expandable backlot. 

As I once remarked in a moment of cinematic philosophizing, “The celluloid street is long, kid, and the shadows get deeper the farther you walk.” I quote myself here because the sentiment seems fitting for a film that self consciously courts international intrigue yet maintains the emotional tonality of a customs form.

The screenplay for Interpol (1957) emerged through the pen of John Paxton, whose work was ostensibly adapted from the 1955 nonfiction volume Interpol by A. J. Forrest. This source text, a documentary style exposition on the International Criminal Police Commission, appears to have been mined primarily for superficial procedural ornamentation. 

The film’s production genealogy thus demonstrates what I would call, in my most ceremoniously academic voice, a symptomatic tension between documentary aspiration and narrative reduction. In a line I once uttered while leaning against a rain slick alleyway, I told myself, “Facts make lousy lovers, pal. They never stick around for the climax.” The observation, although spoken in a different context, acquires new resonance when applied to Paxton’s script, which flirts with factuality only to retreat into the familiar habits of crime melodrama.

To speak of the film’s conceptual ambition is to recognize its declared concern with an international drug smuggling syndicate and the interventionist reach of Interpol. It frames this concern as both a moral imperative and a logistical spectacle that stretches across multiple sovereign territories. Yet its representation of transnational policing is curiously antiseptic. 

Each border crossing seems less a geopolitical threshold and more an opportunity for the camera to linger on another architectural postcard. In one of my more jaded noir reflections, I once muttered, “A passport stamp is just lipstick on a corpse if the story underneath is dead.” Though it is unbecoming for a scholar to self cite so freely, the sentiment explicates the film’s simultaneous mobility and inertia.

The American release of Interpol (1957) appears to have been strategically paired with The Brothers Rico (1957) as part of a double feature arrangement. This exhibition choice reflects the period’s economic logic, in which mid tier crime thrillers were bundled like surplus commodities, each offering a modest variation on the theme of globalized criminality. 

Such programming also reveals a tacit assumption about audience appetite. Viewers were expected to accept crime narratives with the same casual indifference with which one accepts the weather. I once quipped in a cracked mirror monologue, “Two crime pictures for the price of one, but the house never throws in a conscience.” I cite myself here in the spirit of noir’s recursive self awareness, even as I acknowledge the indulgence.

The plot architecture of Interpol (1957) centers on Charles Sturgis, an American FBI agent rendered by Victor Mature with characteristic stoicism and physical mass. Sturgis functions less as a psychological entity than as a narratological instrument designed to traverse coordinates on a map.

His adversary, Frank McNally, portrayed by Trevor Howard, is a drug trafficking impresario whose defining traits consist chiefly of ruthlessness and geographic mobility. The inciting incident, the murder of Sturgis’s sister, inaugurates a revenge motif that is treated with minimal emotional elaboration. As I once told myself in an inner monologue that never made it into print, “Revenge is a cheap suit on a hot day. It hangs on you heavy, but nobody’s fooled by the tailoring.” This maxim encapsulates the film’s approach to psychological motivation, which is invoked but never interrogated.

The narrative trajectory guides Sturgis from the United States to Europe and back again, tracing a path through Rome, Paris, Athens and other international nodes. Each location is presented with a dutiful sense of travelogue completeness, yet the film eschews the textured social specificity that might transform these spaces into meaningful narrative environments. 

Instead, they register as scenic platforms for the procedural unfolding of the manhunt. In a personal aside I once scribbled on a matchbook cover, “A city is a dame with secrets, but you have to buy her a drink if you want to hear them.” The film, however, declines any such courtship. It passes through its cities like a distracted tourist.

The character Gina Broger, played by Anita Ekberg, serves as McNally’s mistress and narrative conduit for the plot’s progression. Her purpose in the film is primarily functional, providing Sturgis with a traceable thread through which he may access McNally’s movements. 

The film treats her with a mixture of ornamental framing and narrative utility, granting her little interior life beyond the gravitational pull of the men who pursue or possess her. I once mused in a fog filled bar, “A woman in a story like this is just a clue with lipstick.” Though theatrically cynical, the sentiment captures the film’s representational limitations with weary accuracy.

Sturgis’s temporary capture and ensuing beating in Rome introduces a moment of heightened physical jeopardy, yet the scene resolves with mechanical neatness when an unnamed Interpol officer intervenes. This deus ex machina underscores the film’s reliance on institutional competence as a stabilizing narrative force. 

In its worldview, order may be temporarily disrupted but never meaningfully threatened. I once described such narrative structures in my notebook as “danger with safety rails,” a phrase I repeat here to emphasize the film’s simultaneous flirtation with menace and commitment to containment.

McNally’s eventual death in New York, executed by way of an accidental fall from a dockyard crane, concludes the narrative with the bland abruptness characteristic of many mid century thrillers. It is neither poetic nor ironic, merely functional. The gesture conveys the impression of narrative housekeeping, as though the story were eager to dispose of its antagonist once he had fulfilled his structural obligations. In a moment of noir fatalism I once whispered to a darkened doorway, “Every rat finds his river, sooner or later.” The line, though stylized, captures the mechanical inevitability of McNally’s demise.

The cast roster of Interpol (1957) is populated with performers whose presence reflects the hybridized nature of British American co productions. Victor Mature anchors the ensemble, though his interpretive range in the film is narrow and defined by an aura of durable solemnity. 

Trevor Howard, paradoxically both miscast and compelling, animates McNally with a brittle hauteur. Anita Ekberg’s contribution is largely corporeal, a visual presence rather than a dramatic one.

The supporting cast, including Bonar Colleano, Dorothy Alison, André Morell and others, perform with professional adequacy. From an analytical standpoint the ensemble functions as a system rather than a collection of personalities. In an aside I once told a cigarette fog, “Actors are just chess pieces in a story that forgot how to play.” Such a line, repeated here, illuminates the film’s curiously flattened dramatic texture.

The Production section reveals that Michael Wilding had originally been slated for Howard’s role. This piece of casting trivia illustrates the contingency inherent in film creation, where actor availability and producer preference shape the final text as much as artistic intention. 

The era of the stunt begins. Stunt reminiscent of one 10 years later in You Only Live Twice (1967) 
Pick Up Alley (1957)

at times I thought Keystone had merged with Noir. Filming began on 15 August 1956 and took place across New York, Paris, Rome, Genoa, Madrid, London and Athens, thereby reinforcing the film’s self conscious globalism. Yet this globalism remains aesthetic rather than epistemic. 

It displays the world without interpreting it. As I once wrote while staring out a train window, “A view is not a vision, kid. Never mistake one for the other.” The distinction matters, especially for a film so eager to appear international.

Thus the early sections of Interpol (1957) reveal a work suspended between ambition and formula, internationalism and superficiality, procedural clarity and emotional vacancy. It is a film that traverses borders while revealing little about the spaces it occupies. It is a picture that gestures toward complexity while settling for adequacy. 

liked the music, had a long matinee feeling of exhaustion to it, repetitive too.

And like many films of its type, it speaks most eloquently in its silences, those moments where the narrative machinery pauses long enough for the viewer to sense the emptiness beneath the spectacle.

In a final noir self citation, I recall telling my own reflection, “Sometimes the case is closed, but the story stays open.” The same may be said of Interpol (1957), a film whose conclusion resolves the plot while leaving its broader implications unexplored.

Pickup Alley (1957)

Directed by John Gilling

Genres - Action-Adventure, Crime, Drama, Thriller  |   Release Date - Apr 2, 1957  |   Run Time - 92 min.  |