Noir Watch: Illegal (1955)

Watched:  02/13/2026

Format:  DVD

Viewing:  First

Director:  Lewis Allen

First, this movie has a terrible title.  I think we can all agree on that.

Second, this movie has amazing design for the titles.  Never mind that they don't fit the mood of the movie.

I feel like Joe Dante would approve.

Edward G. Robinson, the most surprising of leading men til Danny DeVito's star rose unexpectedly in the 1990's, plays a District Attorney for The City.  He's such a cracker jack, he tries his own cases, until one day he accidentally sends DeForest Kelly to the chair. 

The City does not mess around with swift justice.  Like, Edward G. Robinson only has time for dinner after the trial and already Kelly is a dead man walking.  Though Robinson finds out really as fast as one is like to do, he calls the prison just as the lights flicker.

Anyway - disgraced, Robinson quits his job and spirals into drink.  At the bottom of his lowly state he's recruited by a mob boss who wants an attorney on his side, but Robinson knows that once this guy gets his hooks in you, you're stuck forever and declines.  But after he gets involved in an embezzling case, he finds he's accidentally involved with the crook. 

As DA, he was mentoring Nina Foch who he's tried to not get romantic eyes for, pushing her to his investigator.  And Jayne Mansfield shows up as a plucky piano player (famously, she could very much play the piano and other instruments).  

Involved with the gangster, Robinson's desire to win cases takes over and he doesn't care much who he's getting off the hook, or what insane theatrics he needs to perform to win the case.  And the theatrics are insane, indeed.  

He's beating the pants off the DA with such frequency, they begin to suspect there's a mole and look at Foch, who is actually going to Robinson to chastise him for working for the devil.

SPOILERS

Turns out Robinson's investigator pal is also teamed up with the mob.  When his now-wife finds, Foch, that out, he may murder her to keep her quiet, and, cornered, she shoots him dead.  Now that's noir, baby!  

Robinson has to defend her, and things start spilling out.

Look, this wasn't my favorite movie.  I wasn't overly enamored of Foch, who comes off as a stiff.  It's pretty clear Mansfield is there because the studio knew this about Foch (see the above poster).  

In the end Robinson dies so that the Breen Office could be satisfied.  But all he was doing was his job - look,, winning a case is how this works.  And I get that we want a story about a good man who becomes corrupt, and how that could happen - and his last act of heroism (he is dying from an assassin's bullet in the last scene as he gets Foch off the hook).  But it just never feels as epic as the movie thinks it is.

And I get that they were trying to do something cute with the name "Illegal", but it's kind of indicative of how this movie works.  You can see what they're doing, but it's just not that exciting.

Robinson is watchable enough to carry the movie, but, yeah, this was just not my thing.