711 Ocean Drive

Plot synopsis:
Knowing how much telephone repairman Mal Granger (Edmond O'Brien) likes to bet on the horses, small-time bookmaker Chippie Evans (Sammy White) proposes a scheme in which Granger's technical expertise would provide gangster Vince Walters (Barry Kelley) with race results in advance.
Granger accepts and also takes an interest in Walters' attractive assistant, Trudy (Dorothy Patrick), but she is arrested. Granger's new method of getting track information to the bookies makes him invaluable. He threatens to cut Walters off unless he is made a 20% partner. Walters gives in. When Walters tries to collect from a bookie who owes him, the bookie kills first Walters, then himself. Granger takes control of the wire service, making him a target for Lieutenant Wright (Howard St. John) of the Los Angeles Police.
East Coast mobster Larry Mason (Don Porter) is sent by boss Karl Stevens (Otto Kruger) to persuade Granger to join the Syndicate. He travels west with his wife Gail (Joanne Dru). Granger decides to accept a 50/50 split with his new partners. Some of the independent bookies do not like the new arrangement (and the extra 20% "protection" fee) and refuse to go along. They are roughed up by Syndicate goons.
Trudy returns to work for Granger; she finds out he is being shortchanged. When he complains, Granger is told that the shortfall is due to "necessary expenses." He vows to get his money.
Granger and Gail are strongly attracted to each other. Mason beats Gail, after which Granger hires a hitman named Gizzi (Robert Osterloh) to kill Mason with a rifle. Gizzi decides to blackmail Granger, who agrees to pay $25,000 at a rendezvous at the Malibu Pier, but there Gizzi announces he intends to become Granger's silent partner. Granger crushes him to death against the pier's railing with his car.
Using his telephone know-how, Granger places a call to Wright that makes it appear he is in Palm Springs and has an alibi. Wright tapes the call and hears a streetcar whistle; there are no streetcars in Palm Springs. The police eventually match the paint from Granger's damaged car to Gizzi's murder.
Granger decides to retire and escape to Guatemala, but first, he sets out to collect what is owed to him. With the help of Gail and Chippie, he taps into a phone line to a mob betting parlor in Las Vegas and pulls off a pass-post swindle. Intercepting and taping race results to be replayed after a two-minute delay, he gives Gail and Chippie time to place substantial bets. Chippie, however, is recognized by a man who bears a grudge against Granger. He tells Stevens, who has Chippie brought to him and learns where Granger can be found. Stevens passes the information along to Wright, content to let the police rid him of a troublesome colleague.
With the police closing in, Granger and Gail flee to Boulder Dam, trying to cross state lines to get out of Wright's jurisdiction, but encounter a roadblock there. They join a tour group and descend into the dam. Gail collapses from fatigue while running, then Granger is killed before he can find his way to the Arizona side.

Tags: murder

Review:
What A Little Know How Will Get You. 711 Ocean Drive finds Edmond O'Brien as just a working stiff, toiling away at a job for the telephone company and getting a bit behind in with his bookie.
He takes him to wire service operator Barry Kelley who controls the illegal gambling in Southern California and Kelley puts O'Brien to work, modernizing the business.That's the beginning of O'Brien's rise in the gambling rackets.
He's talented, but his reach exceeded his grasp, especially when he started reaching for Joanne Dru while she was still married to racketeer Don Porter.There's a lot of similarity between O'Brien and Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra.
Still that climax which takes place at Hoover Dam was definitely inspired by High Sierra.Besides those already mentioned look for good performances by Howard St. John as the honest cop on O'Brien's trail, Bert Freed as the syndicate's number one hit man, and Otto Kruger the very smooth syndicate boss who never gets his hands dirty with the details.711 Ocean Drive is a very nice noir film, made at the height of Edmond O'Brien's career as a B picture leading man..
Still, I found the film interesting and entertaining (although D.O.A. remains my all-time favorite O'Brien, and one of my top favorites, overall).
The character of Mal Granger really presented a sharp and unexpected contrast to that of Frank Bigelow in D.O.A. The real surprise in this film came early on when the personality of Granger, itself, did a 180-degree turnaround, from the benign, carefree and kindly telephone repairman (who insisted his co-worker accept a few bucks that he was in need of), to the ruthless, unscrupulous, and murderous "operator" for whom even a little power is seen to surely corrupt.
A better than routine, if not exceptional, noir crime drama, with O'Brien excellent in the lead, and good casting throughout.
Of particular interest are the wonderful filming locations in the L.A. area -- rich streetscapes--full of marvelous period detail, "Modern" architecture as seen in circular drive-ins, open plan houses, groovy bars ands nightclubs, and some flavor of Palm Springs weekending.
With the evolution of O'Brien's character from a telephone repairman into a major crime so well reflected in the improvements in his dress, along with the sartorial variety among the leads, one gets a nice sense of personal style in this period.
For phone lineman Eddie O'Brien, it's a success story, as opportunity, know-how, and drive propel him to the top of the bookie racket.
Then too, we meet some interesting people along the way, including smoothie Otto Kruger doing his best imitation of a smiling cobra, even as young marrieds Joanne Dru and Don Porter practice their 1950's version of open marriage.
This film stars Edmund O'Brien as a scheming and brilliant mobster--a far cry from the good guy roles in Film Noir films such as DOA and WHITE HEAT.
It seems that although at the beginning of the film he's a simple worker for the phone company, he is an expert with electronics and phone lines, so he's able to help a small California mob grow until it controlled the entire state's bookmaking operation.
Not content to be just a bit player, he works his way up to the top of this mob until the "big boys" back East recognize his worth and they want a piece of the action.
Eventually, O'Brien's greed and feelings of invulnerability take their toll--leading to a stirring finale at Hoover Dam. As expected, O'Brien did an excellent job and he was one terrific actor--particularly in his gangster films.
O'Brien's love interest is Joanne Dru, who plays a screwed up lady who wants to see O'Brien go straight but does nothing to actually change him and also does a lot to excuse his excesses.
Oddly, Howard St. John plays the honest and determined police detective bent on stopping O'Brien--since in most films St. John plays heavies or weak-willed jerks.Overall, it was a very engaging and original Noir film.
Overall, it's a very good film but a far cry from the greatness and excitement of the better examples of Noir due to its occasionally heavy-handed "crime does not pay" message.
"711 Ocean Drive" is an interesting '50s film noir set in Los Angeles.
Edmond O'Brien stars as Mal Granger, a nice telephone repairman who is into a bookie for some gambling debts.
The bookie makes a deal with him and, since he's a technician, has him do some modernization on the illegal gambling in the area that uses the wire service.
The O'Brien character turns out to be pretty ambitious and greedy and starts making his way up the ladder in the syndicate.
There are also very good performances from Howard St. John as a police officer, Bert Freed as a hit man, and Otto Kruger as a mob boss.
Joanne Dru is the object of Mal's affections, although she's married to someone else.Seeing Los Angeles in the '50s is one of the best parts of this film.
The address of Edmond O'Brien's posh Malibu digs -- 711 Ocean Drive -- lends the title to this semidocumentary noir about bookmaking.
O'Brien, always better supporting than, as here, in the lead, is a money-grubbing telephone technician who brings his electronic expertise to the illegal-betting circuit.
At the end, O'Brien's grasping ambitions are dwarfed by the enormity of Boulder Dam, and viewers are left with a sense of his brief notoriety being but a single cog in a vast, unstoppable crime machine.
Enjoyed this great 1950 film starring Edmond O'Brien, ( Mal Granger) who plays the role of a telephone repair man with great skills in communications and all kinds of ability to set up telephone lines anywhere he so desires.
Mal gets tired of his old routine job and meets up with his bookie who places his bets on the race track and offers him a very profitable job with the big time gambling bosses.
Mal gets very powerful with all the bookies and begins to disturb the big shot bosses from other states and that is when Carl Stephens, (Otto Kruger) decides he is going to cut in on Mal Granger's business.
There is many twists and turns in this film and you have some fantastic scenes all around Hoover Dam with non stop entertainment right to the very end.
Along with DOA, The Killers, White Heat, Shield for Murder, the Hitchhiker, this entry attests to the style of O'Brien, who may be the worlds best sweater.
The best moments are really not the climactic finale, but rather those where O'Brien banters with Otto Kruger (who is perfect) and Don Porter.
These Movies were not only for Entertainment but for a sort of Public Service.Technology was also a "new" element in Law Enforcement and the Fight against Communism and Films were want to display as much High Tech Stuff as possible.
We get quite a bit of that here with Electronic Whiz Kid, Edmond O'Brien strutting His Stuff and landing a Slot with the Local Mob. This is a less Personal Film then most Noir's and tends to paint with a wide brush with its Coast to Coast Crime Syndicate with tangled wires and many Locations.A good tightly wound Thriller, this has an Energy for sure and hardly ever settles down and the Interpersonal is disposed of quite Brutally at times.
Why not take a trip to 711 Ocean Drive and visit Edmond O'Brien?
In fact, O'Brien plays his villainous part so carefully and so smoothly that we almost cannot be sure he won't be redeemed by the time it all ends.Of course, the story has been written and filmed to denounce organized crime, so the outcome for O'Brien's character may seem obvious to viewers-- but it is to his credit that O'Brien gives us a few points to stop along the way, to hit the brakes and turn off the road at a junction where we can think and say 'what if--.'Fans of the actor may also want to check out D.O.A. and SHIELD FOR MURDER..
While Oscar winner, Edmond O'Brien, was never much of a leading man, he does a very good acting job in this 1950 film.
Here he plays a telephone installer whose knowledge of electronics soon gets him involved with the mob affairs in phone hookups and gambling.
By a quirk of fate, O'Brien moves up readily until he is put in charge of the western operations.The film, an interesting one, deals with mob relations, deceit, corruption and has plenty of violence.Watch for an interesting performance by Hardy Kruger as a gambling magnate.
Howard St. John appears as a police detective who is hot on the trail of O'Brien and there is a brief but memorable acting job by Don Porter, who later turned to comedy in the television show "Private Secretary" with Ann Sothern.The film admirably deals with the evils of gambling and its relation to organized crime.
Well worth watching as well to see the interesting performance of Joanne Dru, as Porter's wife and O'Brien's girlfriend..
(I suppose if the producer hired an off-duty policeman to stand guard for an hour, the film was made 'under police protection'.) The film stars Edmond O'Brien, who was in impressive form here as a bad guy, though it would not be until Ida Lupino chose him for the lead three years later in her remarkable film THE BIGAMIST (1953, see my review) that it would become clear to all what a truly fine and versatile actor he really was.
In this film he is a telephone communications expert who gets hired to create a wire network for race track bookies, but he takes it over and develops a serious case of ego inflation and goes mad with power and greed.
Reliable Edmund O'Brien stars in this fairly routine B-thriller as a phone company repairman who uses his electrical knowhow to set up a highly efficent bookie system for a local gangster.
O'Brien's reach extends his grasp when he sets up the murder of one of his new partners (Don Porter), because the hit man decides that he should also be getting a cut of the action.
The movie's best scene is its big finish at Boulder Dam (aka Hoover Dam), where O'Brien and Joann Dru take the tour down into the guts of the concrete beast to elude the cops.
Despite the 1950 charm of Los Angeles, a couple of ominous characters and the rapid changes in O'Brien's fortunes, "711 Ocean Drive" (possibly a reference to O'Brien's Malibu digs) never seems to work up a good head of steam until the very end..
Edmond O'Brien (as Mal Granger) is an ordinary telephone repairman who must supplement his measly salary by betting on a few horse races; he decides to use his electronics skills to help racetrack "bookies" illegally wire results to Bad Barry Kelley (as Vince Waters).
The first "job" he takes is difficulty to accept as illegal (obviously, they had no cell phones back then); but, later on, O'Brien gets in deeper.
This is a "flashback" film, describing the rise and fall of O'Brien's character Granger, accompanied by a dreadfully gooey sermon.
Newman ~ Edmond O'Brien, Joanne Dru, Otto Kruger.
Like Bogie in 'The Harder They Fall', here good egg Edmund O'Brien is seduced by degrees into lowlife violent crime -- main motivation: an honest working man can't make it, so if yer smart enough to work a con you'd best get to getting', especially if invited in by a big player.Barry Kelly repulses as a small-time crime boss bully who fancies himself a legitimate businessman.
Otto Kruger as the faux-elegant big-time crime boss nauseates, and Don Porter (Gidget's TV dad) as psycho wife-beater and wife-pimp, puts a bland smiley face on pure evil.
"711 Ocean Drive" falls into the gray area of Film Noir/Policer/Mob Movie.
"White Heat", only a year before and also with Edmond O'Brien?
And it's true noir; There are no good guys except the cops.Other commentors have not seized on the things that make this most interesting, in that if you were around at the time (or seeing it today as a fan of mob movies), you would recognize some startling characters portrayed at a time which was arguably the high point of the power of American organized crime.
When the ultimate lawman, John Edgar Hoover himself, swore before the country that "No national criminal conspiracy exists", which of course was the farthest thing from the truth, it was a pretty sweet time to be the Mafia.Faithful Otto Kruger, doing what he does best in playing a genteel killer, is a thinly fictionalized Meyer Lansky.
These things get betterSammy White, who plays Chippie, looks for all the world like a young(er) Lee Strasburg, who played the Meyer Lansky character in "Godfather II".
But O'Brien carries it off nicely, given what he has to work with.There is one gigantic plot hole: There is no way on earth the syndicate would not suspect that O'Brien was responsible for Porters murder.
The film stars Edmond O'Brien, Joanne Dru, Otto Kruger, Barry Kelly, Sammy White, Dorothy Patrick, Howard St John, Don Porter and Robert Osterloh.
His bookie, Sammy White, says he can hook O'Brien up with his boss, Barry Kelly.
White is sure a guy with O'Brien's smarts with phones etc could be useful.
Sure enough, O'Brien has Kelly's wire service up and running at top speed in no time.
Kelly agrees because he needs O'Brien to run the new electronic set up.
They decide to invite themselves in as partners for a 50 percent cut.The mob boss, Otto Kruger, sends out his man, Don Porter to talk with O'Brien about the deal.
Porter takes his wife, Joanne Dru along to see the coast.
O'Brien does not like the mob move, but knows he should play along.
The mob is not pleased with the hit and question O'Brien, Dru etc.
By this time, the Police have become interested in O'Brien and the operation.
The Detective in charge, Howard St. John roots around looking for a reason to bust up O'Brien and the mob's racket.Now a further fly lands in the old ointment, Osterloh.
Of course matters now start to go to pieces for O'Brien and Dru. The mob has tumbled on their own to O'Brien's involvement with their man Porter's killing.
O'Brien, Dru and his man, Sammy White, are soon on the road to Vegas.
There, they use some of O'Brien's knowledge of the wire service to beat the mob out of 250 large.
That's the epilogue of this film noir set in the world of track betting where a hard working and struggling telephone repair man (Edmond O'Brien) gets a little too involved in the $2 bet and ends up as part of a very large racket that is expanding thanks to its suave secret head (Otto Kruger) who stays as clean as those who work for him get dirtier.
This is organized crime at its dirtiest, because as the cops reveal, they have nothing on the big boys (or even the ratting middle men), but need their help in getting their hands on O'Brien whose involvement in the gambling rackets goes from the $2 bet to murder!
It is well written and clever, but perhaps a bit too clever for its own good, as the opening narration indicates, having survived attempts to have the filming shut down by actual rackets who didn't want their secrets exposed.To get past the convoluted structure and really understand what is going on, you have to go into this clear minded, and once you get past the first opening reels of explanatory detail, you will see how the common man gets in over their head, manipulated by the smarter outsiders in this racket who utilize his talents but eventually he gets in over his head by becoming involved with Joanne Dru, the troubled wife of one of the main rackateers (Don Porter).
O'Brien gives an outstanding performance as you see his rise from struggling respectability to on the run felon, with Kruger malevolent as the big man.
The finale sequence is the epitome of suspense, taking O'Brien and Dru on the run to the Hoover Dam, going down 44 stories to the depths of the Colorado River in an attempt to cross state lines.
Having only flown over the dam several times over the years, I was amazed to see a bit of how it worked, and got spooked with the stair climbing sequence that I half expected to end with either cops or rackateers waiting for O'Brien at the other end by saying, "What too you so long?" This is a film I know I will re-visit before long because it is definitely one of the more fascinating film noirs to study, even if as a whole, the film is just good, not great, aided by those location sequences and stand-out performances..
Unfortunately this thing cheated the ending and the guy just gets shot down next to some cars, just in time for a sermony coda about the evils of gambling.
I'd like to give this film a better recommendation but there's nothing really special about it, nothing that lifts it above the average crime drama of the time, except perhaps the business about modern electronics to update the bookie business, and that's pretty much gotten over with in the first twenty minutes.Edmond O'Brien is an ambitious but honest telephone lineman who is hired by a local bookie manager -- is that the right term?
Instead, there is one of those pointless shoot outs, in which O'Brien is wounded and stumbles at a run across the dam, bullets whistling past him, firing back blindly, until he collapses on the asphalt.Joanne Dru is in it, looking good, as is what's her name, Dorothy Patrick as one of several blonds that O'Brien picks up and discards on his way to the top.