Anthony Mann's T-Men (1947) cannot have the worst narration known to film noir. It can't even have the worst narration known to semi-documentary noir, the ripped-from-the-newsreels cultivar whose procedural ancestry renders it congenitally susceptible to public service announcements and uncredited Reed Hadley. It doesn't need to when it has a narration with such a god-awful sense of timing that eight years after the fact I can still use it as my personal low-water mark for voiceovers that should let their movies speak for themselves.

That the film affords its narrator—the inescapable Hadley—any opportunity for interruption is all the more aggravating since T-Men is really not a policier. Despite its opening flourish of institutional credentials including an establishing sweep of the National Mall, a few words from Elmer Lincoln Irey, and the literal seal of approval of the United States Department of the Treasury, its heart isn't in the technical minutiae of paper samples and hand-engraved plates and coded accounts that comprise the MacGuffins of the "Shanghai Paper Case." Of much more interest than the guaranteed exposure of the counterfeiting ring that's been passing its phony bills and revenue stamps from Detroit to Los Angeles are the less straightforward effects on the agents assigned to infiltrate this half-world of steambaths and flophouses, apothecaries and amusement piers and a recklessly tossed hotel room the last stop on this shadowiest line. The cop out in this cold isn't the mirror of the criminal, the badge is just the passport between them. Shining armor is to be left strictly at the door. Even the clean-cut introductions granted our federal moles of Dennis O'Brien and Anthony Genaro (Dennis O'Keefe and Alfred Ryder) serve mostly to set up the contrast once they have submerged themselves in the tougher, flashier personae of Vannie Harrigan and Tony Galvani, plausibly late of the rubbed-out River Gang. Flying in to D.C. from St. Louis, the veteran O'Brien shows his sense of humor when he mimes a joke about pruning the hat of the seatmate he actually lets doze unmolested on his shoulder, while the greener Genaro poignantly sets up his wife's picture to watch him while he fills out his report on the train from Indianapolis, but at their briefing they are already closing ranks like a hard-boiled double act when offered an out from the risky assignment. "Did you hear anybody say anything?" O'Brien innocently quizzes and Genaro without missing a drag on his cigarette seconds the lie: "Uh-uh." Their survival as they navigate the criminal hierarchies and rivalries obscuring the source of the ersatz currency will depend on this ability to deny anything and everything down to their own lives. As they fit themselves out with legends suitable to a couple of mid-level lowlifes hustling for the bigger time, just the uncharacteristically dressy drape of a suit points to the cost of their imposture when Genaro imagines modeling for his wife only to be reminded, "You've been divorced for reasons of duty." All the official injections of American flags and forensics and portraits of Lincoln for crying out loud can't distract from this essential alienation which so efficiently separates its heroes from their law-abiding selves. O'Brien passes a counterfeit sawbuck of his own in order to bait the notice of competitive crooks. Genaro sweats a potential informer as relentlessly as the beating he took as a buying-in. Dissolving into the darkness that eats into each hard-lit, deep-focus frame of their cover, they become as brutal and paranoid as spies in a looking-glass war, so explicitly indistinguishable from actual hoods bribing and backstabbing to their best advantage that the plethora of duplicate imagery which constantly traps its characters in reflecting superimposition feels as much like an in-joke as subtext. "A guy that used to be high up—and slipped—and is scared—is a set-up." Such loyalty as can exist in this duplicitous world has to be expert itself at double-speaking, which is where the stentorian instincts of T-Men really screw the pooch.

If the film has one principle to impart to its audience, it is the lie as the agent's lifeline. If you love someone in the photogravure world of T-Men, you lie for them. Deny them to their face, deride them if you have to, but don't count the cost to yourself if it keeps them safe. As the plot grinds itself deeper into the shadows of the third act, a one-two of parallel scenes punches this point home. Back at the start of the case in Washington, the bureau chief expressed some concern over the visiting presence of Genaro's wife in San Francisco, but nixed the suggestion to alert her to her husband's work on the West Coast. Now among the open-air stalls of the Los Angeles Farmers Market, they find themselves dragged face to face by a cheerfully chattering mutual friend, a slight, dark, dapper man flashing his cynicism like a mug shot and a soft-curled, summer-gloved woman with all her heart shining in her eyes, true as her picture. "Your husband! Aren't you going to kiss him?" Not for nothing is Mary Genaro (June Lockhart) an agent's wife, even when given no chance to rehearse the role: she sees her unexpected husband dressed to the cheap nines, keeping the suspicious company of the flop-sweat small-timer known as the Schemer (Wallace Ford) and genially stonewalling all attempts at recognition, and she doesn't even need to meet his eloquently inexpressive eyes to follow his lead. "Lady ought to know," he graciously allows in the matter of his identity. As coolly as if the plate glass and lights of a police lineup were between them, Mary appraises the man she's urged to accept as her own and firmly declines: "My husband's taller and much better-looking." The sudden tears on her cheeks as she watches him steer the uncertain Schemer toward a safely wry exit tell us she understands more than any bureau chief could ever have justified to her. It won't be enough to save him. In futile terror of his double-dealing life, the Schemer will spill secrets that weren't his to keep and all too soon it'll be Tony Genaro lying for someone else's life—with his cover blown, there's not much use in lying for his own. "Almost had you, all of you," he sneers for his lethal audience of paperhangers and the helpless witness of O'Brien, all crowded so closely into the camera that at one point it actually shivers like disturbed mercury, an accidental and apt touch of yene velt as the trapped agent switches dry-mouthed and seamlessly into his last performance from which the criminals should take one message and his partner another. "Top-drawer crook," he taunts the man who must remain the betrayed and believable Vannie Harrigan, whose only safety lies in his dissociation from the nervously scornful spook in a hole. "Lived with me and never caught on! Top-drawer crook," the epithet repeated for good measure since it also indicates the whereabouts of the claim check for which he was caught rifling the room. "Always so sharp, always knew all the angles—" His face folds almost quizzically at the first bullet fired by goon-in-chief Moxie (Charles McGraw). Adhering to the letter of the law of the PCA, the second and third register through the suppressed flinches of O'Brien. The shadow of the fade-out slips over the surviving T-man, his head bowed beneath the ghost-verdict of a deadweight drop to the floor: "You . . . sucker . . ." It's a hell of a shot in a film that's been setting them up and knocking them down. Only a few objective minutes ago, we were watching the death of the Schemer, pathetically and horrifically broiled in his own steam room by the implacable Moxie; the scene is justly notorious, not least because it understands that even the bottom-feeding little fink doesn't deserve such a fate, but its fog-fanned scrabbling doesn't exert the same force of guilt and shock. Genaro wasn't a rookie, but he was O'Brien's junior in years and cases. His fluent first-generation Italian counted more with the department than his field experience. At each stage of the sting, O'Brien was the point man: Genaro was allowed to play out his hunch of pumping the Schemer in part because it looked as hazardous as keeping a straight face while his antsy mark worried himself into an edifying lather. With the evidence to the contrary hitting the fan, it was O'Brien's job to shield them from the fallout and he couldn't do it, stymied as soon as he tried to move independently of his confederates turned handlers: "I'll take care of that curly-haired monkey myself!" – "We'll all take care of him." All he could do was endure his own preservation at the price of the person who followed this maze of face plates and false faces down with him and kept them both in character if it killed one of them. No wonder he looks as though the darkness is all that's left. It fills the screen and the narrator thunders, "For this scrap of paper, Agent Genaro had sacrificed his life. But O'Brien had to carry on alone."

Have some decency, Hadley! The narration prior to this point has frequently described action which the audience can either watch or work out for themselves, such as the research that produced the agents' legends in Detroit or the legwork of tracing the Schemer through his affinity for Turkish baths and Chinese herbs, but never has it so confidently trampled their basic film literacy in the name of patriotism, for which may be read insecurity. Under no circumstances should the loss of Tony Genaro be allowed to sink in with its ironies, ambiguities, or even emotional impact. Any doubts occasioned by the dispatch of a T-man must be snapped back to faith in the institutions of a country that will run its agents in its own cities as if in foreign and ruthless lands. "Have you ever met Tony's wife?" Special Agent Gregg of the Secret Service (Art Smith) muses over the little black book at the other end of the claim check, a meticulous ledger of illicit operations kept in a crude cipher of Greek letters. "Awful nice girl. They'd only been married a few months," a superfluous twist of the heartstrings steamrolled the next second by the earnest assurance that the Schemer's shakedown notes furnished "a mine of information . . . This book is going to give us one of the biggest tax evasion cases since Capone!" Following the harrowing shootout of the finale and the tear-gassed arrests of all the counterfeiters right up to their well-disguised philanthropist of a kingpin, the film concludes in memoriam of the agent who did not live to feature in a special issue of Look magazine: "And Mrs. Mary Genaro carries in her heart the memory of her husband Tony, who died in the service of the people of this country." Then how about not stepping on his death scene for a start? It helps nothing that I associated him idiosyncratically with Tacroy of Diana Wynne Jones' The Lives of Christopher Chant (1988) even before his convincing lying: he isn't coffee-colored enough, but he has the springily coiled hair of his Jewish actor and smart suits and cynical lines in his dialogue as well as his face. In his own right, he deserved a moment of silence from his story which he troubles just by leaving it.

Scripted by John C. Higgins from a story by Virginia Kellogg, T-Men marked its director's first foray into the murky, permeable territory of undercover work which he would revisit more politically in Border Incident (1949) and more flamboyantly in The Black Book (1949) and formed his first showcase for the liquid, abstract, shadow-suffused photography of John Alton, with whom he would shoot five bone-budgeted noirs and a Western. Thanks to his stark and layered compositions, its characters operate in a world smogged in lime and sharpened in ink, skeletonized by low angles and top light. Ocean Park Pier floats in its net of rope lights and rain-mirrored neon. A ship at anchor yawns like a black stage out of Brecht. Everyone's faces appear to have been cast in the same steel as the coveted plates for which O'Brien has to grope beneath a porcelain sink as Moxie shaves himself in the mirror above. It's such a visually witty film, it's only fair that when it isn't cluttering itself up with ineluctably sobersided exegesis it should be very funny, as when O'Brien explains his worn-down state with the deadpan rimshot, "Did you ever spend ten nights in a Turkish bath looking for a man?" Genaro rolls himself backward across a bed to get out of it, a rare and lovely moment of levity from a man who has just been effectively intimidating while barely glancing up from his magazine. Like the sparse key lights, it draws the dark in all the more. If only the film had trusted it to stay there. This angle brought to you by my sharp backers at Patreon.