User Reviews

In the years that followed the end of World War 11, the emergence of the Soviet Union as an atomic power and the spread of global Communism were together seen as a threat to the United States and created a climate of fear that led to the House Committee on Un-American Activities carrying out their 1947 investigation into Communist infiltration of the motion-picture industry. This period, which was characterised by witch-hunts and the blacklisting of people working in the industry, damaged and in some cases, ended many careers. So, the levels of panic and anxiety that prevailed in Hollywood at that time were perfectly understandable.

One of the results of this was the appearance of a number of anti-Communist films and "The Woman On Pier 13" (originally titled "I Married A Communist"), was one of the most prominent and well-known. These movies weren't strong on subtlety and as obvious propaganda pieces, weren't generally that well appreciated by the public.

Newly-married Brad Collins (Robert Ryan), is a Vice President at the Cornwall Shipping Company in San Francisco and as an ex-dock worker, is regarded as the ideal person to act as a mediator in the Company's dispute with the dock workers' union. Brad, who's well-respected by both management and the union, is also however, a man with some secrets because, in the past, he'd been a member of the Communist Party, had been known as Frank Johnson and had also had an affair with fellow Communist, Christine Norman (Janis Carter).

Brad's past suddenly catches up with him when local Party boss, Vanning (Thomas Gomez), uses some incriminating evidence to blackmail him into paying 40% of his salary into Party funds and sabotaging the negotiations he's involved in, so that all shipping activity will be paralyzed for a period of 60 days. Christine, who wants revenge on Brad for dumping her for his new wife, Nan (Laraine Day), seduces Nan's impressionable brother Don (John Ager) and does a good job of converting him to her political views so that, in the union meetings that follow, Don (who's employed as a stevedore on the docks) is very vocal in promoting the arguments he's been programmed to make.

Union leader Jim Travers (Richard Rober), who's also Nan's ex-boyfriend, is shocked by the subsequent change in Brad's conduct in their negotiations and Nan becomes increasingly concerned about Don's relationship with Christine. When Christine falls in love with Don and Vanning disapproves, a whole series of violent events follow.

What makes this movie more entertaining than it would otherwise be, is the depiction of Vanning as a one-dimensional bad guy who operates exactly like a crime boss and is responsible for three murders, as well as, blackmail and extortion. Nicholas Musuraca's cinematography is also exceptionally good.

The movie's film noir credentials are also strong as its central character, having made a wrong turn in his past, was also the victim of a femme fatale, had more than one identity and can't escape his fate. The quality of the acting is also generally good with Robert Ryan, Thomas Gomez and William Talman (in his screen debut) all making a strong impression.

This film was made at the height of the Communist scare (1949) so its theme is thickly padded with plenty of political hysteria which may be a bit foreign to modern-day viewers. That said, it's still highly effective in its depiction of the "Commies" being thoroughly evil and it pulls no punches. John Agar plays a union leader who unknowingly is under the influence of a good-looking blonde (Janis Carter) who just happens to be a communist "plant." Robert Ryan, however, is the star of the film as a man torn between both worlds who inevitably does the "right thing." Along the way, there's plenty of despicable communists to jeer at including Thomas Gomez as a ruthless ringleader and union infiltrator. For fans of early network TV, William Talman (District Attorney Burger from the old "Perry Mason" series) plays a commie henchman who gets what's coming to him. He's so rotten that you'll want to throttle him yourself. On the good side, Laraine Day plays Ryan's loving and understanding wife who's trapped in the convoluted plot.

Whatever one's political leanings, there's more than enough propaganda here to nearly sink this movie, but the performances of the talented cast keep it afloat. Ryan made a career out of playing hard-boiled types and he earned his money for this one. Agar never became the big star many predicted but he's effective in this role and quite sympathetic, even if his character is a bit too naive. Today, he's best remembered for being Shirley Temple's first husband. On the definite "plus side" for "The Woman on Pier 13" is Laraine Day. She looks better than ever and that should be enough to sustain anyone's interest in this film.

**SPOILERS** An attempted takeover of the San Francisco docks by the local commies has former Communisty Party card carrying member Brad Collins, Robert Ryan, in the cross-hairs of both his former commie comrades and the police. Collins who was formerly known as Frank Johnson is being blackmailed in him being exposed not only as a former commie but a murderer in the killing of a union shop steward back on the east coast some time ago.

After disowning the Communist Party Brad has made it big on the SF docks working his way up from a longshoreman to the vice president of a major west coast shipping company. loved and respected by both labor and management Brad is picked to negotiate a new contract for the dock workers only to have his sordid and sleazy past catch up with him. Contacted by his former commie boss Vanning, Thomas Gomez, Brad is blackmailed to stall negotiations and thus instigate a dock strike that is to last at least two months.

That sleazy commie rat Vanning, and his fellow hoodlums, are planning to take over the union and are using Brad as their battering ram, or Trojan Horse, to do it. Brad at first has no choice but to go along with Vannings plans but when his former girlfriend fanatical Communist, under orders of Vanning, Christine Norman (Janis Carter) gets romantically involved with Brad's weak-minded brother-in-law Dan Lowery, John Agar, is when he finally comes to his senses.

Turning Dan into a Crypto-Communist and labor provocateur Christine has the young man, who Brad gave a job as a longshoreman, spew the Communist "Power to the Workers" line to his fellow union members without knowing that he's actually doing it. Dan thinks that he's fighting for his fellow workers rights but in fact is leading them, like lemmings, down the path of financial disaster in having them lose both their jobs and benefits when his behind the scenes controllers, Vanning & Co, take over the union.

As Brad's wife of one month Nan, Laraine Day, starts to get suspicious of just what he's doing in wrecking the labor negotiations it also becomes clear that her younger brother Dan, after he told her, is madly in love with Christine. Somehow Christine's snide and obnoxious, throwing out hints about her love affair with Brad, actions in both Nan and Brads presence has convinced Nan that she's up to no good and want's Dan to have nothing at all to do with her. It's later when Nan finds out that her husband is being blackmailed by Christian and her boss Vanning that she finally realizes that Dan's life as well as future as a married man is in danger, deadly danger.

The film has Brad knowing that his life is ruined, with a murder rap hanging over his head, makes a clean brake with his past as a commie labor leader. Having nothing to lose and everything to gain Brad goes after Vanning and his boys after they kidnapped Nan and murdered his by then enlightened, to what Christine and Vanning were using him for, brother-in-law Dan. Christine herself had by then also realized the wrongs of her ways, in being a die-in-the-wool commie, and not wanting her victim Dan Lowry, whom she fell in love with, pay for them. Christine is soon put on ice, in the city morgue, by a angry and vindictive Vanning who has her thrown out of her high-rise apartment window and then made her murder to look like a suicide.

It's now up to Brad to make everything right to correct the many wrongs that he did in creating the mess that he now finds himself in which sets everything up for the final showdown at the local Cummnist headquarters an empty warehouse on the San Francisco docks.

Despite the usual anti-Communist hysterics that you would expect to find in a movie like "Woman on Pier 13" or "I Married a Communist" the film didn't put former card carrying Communist Brad Collin/ Frank Johnson in a bad light at all. We were shown that Brad was suckered into joining the Communist Party, like thousands of other young men and women like himself during the Great Depression, with the promise of both a job and security for him and his family.

It was also brought out in the movie that Brad was not forced to rat out his fellow Communist members who like himself were nothing but mindless stooges, like Dan Lowry, who had no idea what the Communist Party was planning for the USA and when they realized it dropped their membership cards and left the party. At least the film realized that people can make mistakes , by unknowingly joining subversive organizations, and at the same time not be forced to suffer for them, even after renouncing what they did, for the rest of their lives. This is something that most if not all anti-Communist movies coming out of Hollywood in the 1940's and 1950's sadly overlooked.

Typical anti-red propaganda, made at the height of Hollywood's scary blacklisting chapter in its history. It's all because a promising businessman (Robert Ryan), once a registered communist under a different name, has been located by an old girlfriend (Janis Carter) and exposed to the big man (Thomas Gomez), even though he wants no part of them. Carter is now involved with the brother (John Agar) of Ryan's fiancée (Laraine Day) and is trying to convert him, even though he's a staunch democrat even if he is a bit liberal.

This is actually pretty enjoyable even if the motivations in making it are extremely obvious. The commies are actually identifiable as human beings, not cartoonish like other anti-Communist films (in particular "The Red Menace" and "Big Jim McLain") where the message comes at you like a 3-D movie monster. There's some really horrific violence, pretty taut for a film made during the studio era, a sign that the production code was slowly loosing steam.

It's not often you get effective film noir combined with red scare, Communist propaganda, but this film delivers both in droves. It has shipping company executive Brad Collins (Ribert Ryan) in the unenviable position of having been a Communist Party member in his youth, now being blackmailed to help the commies achieve their goal of calling a union strike and tying up shipments, causing chaos throughout the industry. Recently married to pretty Nan Collins (Laraine Day) following a whirlwind romance, Collins finds a former flame entering his life to further move along the commie plot. Seeing as how party member Christine Norman (Janis Carter) has her work cut out, she also enlists Nan's younger brother in the devious scheme by engaging him in a romance in order to secure his participation. The tension is palpable, especially when Commie bigwig Vanning (Thomas Gomez) shakes down Collins for forty percent of his salary, demonstrating what happens to defectors should they defy him. Just ask the unfortunate guy Ralston (Paul Guilfoyle), who wound up in the harbor without the ability to use his arms and legs. That last remark was rhetorical, you can't really ask him now, can you?

All the while, one suspects that Collins will eventually do the right thing, and he does, but it comes with a price. This is one film in which you root for the film's principal player, but by foiling the Commies, he winds up breathing his last. But not before recommending his new bride reconnect with her former suitor (Richard Rober), which under the circumstances, seemed like a hokey way to end the story.

If you want a good movie about Commie rats in a plot to muck up the workers at the waterfront, be sure to see "Big Jim McLain" and skip this one because it's thoroughly pedestrian. The actors do a professional job but they're hobbled by their roles. Robert Ryan has turned in some exceptional performances in, say, "Dangerous Ground" or "Crossfire, but he can't do a THING here, as a former member of the Communist Party blackmailed into sabotaging talks between the union and the ship owners in San Francisco.

He reluctantly keeps the arrangement sub rosa and it's driving his wife, Laraine Day, crazy because, well, "What's come OVER you?" Poor John Agar, never given to bravura acts, is seduced into holding Commie attitudes at the dock and for his sins the Commie chief, Thomas Gomez, has him run over flat on the pavement. These are the kinds of people who kill you if it advances their cause, so if you actually threaten they're cause, you're dead meat.

The plot is okay but it's as if they'd dusted off some anti-Nazi screenplay from the back shelf and changed the Nazis into Commies. Robert Stevenson is the director and he must have been reading a manual on making a movie. When two characters are about to have a dramatic exchange, one of them walks towards the camera, stops, assumes a look of concern, and the other character walks up behind him and speaks to the other's back. The tactic involves all the skill of winding an old-fashioned alarm clock.

Everything else about the production -- lighting, set dressing, photography, wardrobe -- lacks the slightest touch of poetry. There are some second-unit shots of San Francisco, including one of the long-gone International Settlement, which was fun in its day. But really, you're better off watching John Wayne give speeches and beat the crappola out of the subversive Commie rats in "Big Jim McClain." It's laughable, whereas this simply generates a sense of boredom and impatience.

I Married a Communist Oooohhh, Hollywood movies from the 50s (well, late 40s)... This was produced by Howard Hughes to test filmmaker loyalty to capitalism, and several famous directors refused to do it. The interesting thing about it is that it's really a great movie, especially from the time. It's a story about a man who has moved on from his sordid, gang-related past to move up in the world and become a vice president of wide respect and admiration to a major shipping corporation, marry a woman he loves (though suddenly), and generally be considered an all-around good guy until the gang reenters his life and with blackmail, threats, and distortion, force him into subverting everything that he has done and made well by. Except that "the gang" is communists talking eternally about the vastly all-powerful seeing eye of Saur--I mean, The Party. Honestly, except for the fact that the image of communists as murderous industrial saboteurs operating out of factories and refusing to show emotion while killing anyone who does is completely ridiculous, if you imagine them as any other boogeyman secret society like the all-popular conspiracy theorist target The Skulls or anything else you can come up with, this is still a very gripping and thrilling movie. Specific the the free market and the American way! theme, though, is some wonderful lines such as, "You capitalists, always trying to be martyrs!" (and succeeding!) and the constant statement that this is what politics is all about--because, you know, it's that important, if you get led astray by those commies they'll beat the life out of you and make you pay for it.

It's somehow an incredibly campy and ridiculous concept that doesn't survive past the Cold War and an engaging industrial thriller of immaculate structure and suspense building at the same time. The characters especially are great, all of them are believable as long as you stretch your imagination to accommodate the head honcho of the dirty commie underworld, who is every image of villainy condensed into one. The wife also is a surprisingly intelligent and capable character herself, rare in movies of the genre, especially in that era, where smart and self-accomplished women were basically the femme fatales.

Honestly, despite the fact that this movie is very well made noir through and through, I can see why it's never been released on DVD, or why it eventually gained the alternate title "The Woman on Pier 13." The movie is good, but the concept is somewhat embarrassing, made all the more so by how seriously it is presented.

--PolarisDiB