The FBI Story

This starts almost like a high school educational film about the FBI. The narration is actually veteran agent Chip Hardesty (James Stewart) doing a lecture. He recounts the story of the FBI starting from its early haphazard days in 1924. He marries pretty librarian Lucy Ann Ballard (Vera Miles). Over the years, he investigates the Ku Klux Klan, the Osage Indian murders, various gangsters, Nazis in Brazil, and communist spies.

This is a sympathetic look at the FBI approved by Hoover. The opening is like a school educational film which is par for the course. It's an old fashion take on the federal police force. It definitely doesn't indulge in any controversies against the FBI. There may violence by the KKK but there is no mentions of lynching. They round up enemy aliens during WWII but they don't talk about the thousands of innocent citizens in internment camps. It's also episodic in nature. The plot doesn't flow as much as it continues on and on. This is definitely a movie where Hollywood submits to authority.

This is an entertaining "history" of the FBI, but it should be viewed as fiction, because that's exactly what it is. What else could it be when J. Edgar Hoover personally approved and had a cameo role in the production. James Stewart is excellent, as usual, and the supporting cast, except for the talentless Vera Miles, is good. Murray Hamilton is especially good in a supporting role as Stewart's partner and best friend. The FBI accomplishments that the film highlights are undoubtedly all true. What is significant is what it leaves out.

One of the most shameful parts of the film is the depiction of the killing of John Dillinger. It is portrayed pretty much as it happened, but no mention at all is made of Melvin Purvis, the Chicago Bureau Chief who headed the operation. Instead, the operation is depicted as if the fictional Chip Hardesty were running it. It has been said that Hoover was jealous of the publicity that Purvis received after Dillinger was killed; Purvis was subsequently transferred to a remote outpost, and shortly afterward left the FBI. This is no doubt why Purvis was never mentioned in the film. But this viewer, at least, paused to think that if Purvis was treated this way, what about all the agents who conducted all the other operations depicted in the film. Were they also completely ignored and replaced by the fictional Hardesty.

The film is probably accurate in its portrayal of FBI activity up through the end of WWII. However, after that point, the film would have us believe that the only threat facing the US came from international communism, which is no doubt what Hoover believed. Never mind the Mafia. Never mind the lynchings that were still going on in the South. Never mind that blacks were being intimidated to keep them from voting in much of the South. I don't know if the FBI had started wiretapping Martin Luther King by the time this film was made, but if not, it wasn't very long afterward that it started.

As I said at the outset, this is pretty good entertainment, but it should be viewed as the sanitized fictionalization that it is.

An entertaining tribute to American law enforcement's most legendary force falls victim to Hollywood hokum, unrealistic dialogue, and choking piety regarding everything about the Federal Bureau Of Investigation, especially its founder, J. Edgar Hoover.

While Hoover is often referenced, sometimes heard, and even briefly seen at his desk, Buddha-like, the focus here is on fictional FBI agent Chip Hardesty (James Stewart), who dedicates himself to serving the bureau through decades of crime-fighting heroics. Whether ambushing John Dillinger or rounding up the Ku Klux Klan, Hardesty provides a case example of the heroism from which the FBI was made.

The final words of the film, superimposed on the screen over triumphant fanfare, establish what "The FBI Story" is all about: "Our sincere thanks to the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover not only for their guidance and active participation in the making of this motion picture but also for making this world of ours a safer place in which to live..."

If they had saved this boilerplate for the end, "The FBI Story" might have had a chance. Stewart was one of the greats, and in Vera Miles as the love interest he enjoys steady support. Few color films from the 1950s are this crisp- and dynamic-looking. Director Mervyn LeRoy was famously good at his job, and manages some stellar framing work with an eye for period detail in the episodic sequences showing Hardesty on the job at various stages of the FBI's existence.

But the accent of this film is not on delivering quality entertainment but burnishing Director Hoover's ego. At every turn, we get our noses rubbed into how brilliant an organization he set up, to the point where suspense gets crushed before it has a chance to develop.

An opening sequence features Nick Adams as a young man named Graham who kills his mother and 48 other people on board a plane by putting a bomb inside her luggage. Immediately we see FBI agents questioning him and searching his house until he cracks and confesses, even yelling at the end to send his mail to hell.

"Jack Graham's only mistake was that he was absent-minded," Stewart tells us in a voice-over. "He forgot about the broad research powers of the FBI."

Elsewhere we get lengthy descriptions of what these powers are, and even footage of people typing or staring into microscopes at FBI headquarters.

The dialogue in this film is much too purple, as if competing for your attention with Max Steiner's bombastic score. There are some howlers other reviewers here pointed out; my favorite is when Miles gets cross when she finds out her husband is going out armed to take on some public enemies. He tells her to take it easy.

"You take it easy, Chip! I don't look good in black."

Murray Hamilton has his own over-the-top moments as Chip's FBI buddy, all charged up with Hoover in charge. "I never wanna cool down," he says. No worries; a breathless script by Richard L. Breen and John Twist won't let him until it's time to stop and smell the lilacs.

There's one solid sequence where Hardesty investigates the murders of Osage Indians in Oklahoma. That works as a crime story with some mystery and humor to it, not to mention a satisfying wrapper.

The rest of the time, it's like some jacked-up medley of J. Edgar's greatest hits, like taking down bank robbers and a Soviet spy ring. Much padding involves Hardesty's family affairs, like his search for missing tissue paper or a crisis involving a shattered dish of pickles. Even when the script tries to drum up a crisis between Hardesty and his wife, the result is unconvincing and much-too-easily resolved.

That goes for most everything else involving "The FBI Story," rich in visual style but cheap in too many other departments, including the kind of patriotism too often used as the refuge of scoundrels. I do admire J. Edgar Hoover in some areas, but when it came to making movies, he should have stayed in the closet.

When I was a very young teen, I saw this in the theater and was just awed. The different segments were very dramatic and stayed with me for decades.

So after a long, long absence, seeing this again in the late '90s turned out to be a major disappointment. As a kid, this movie was exciting, but it sure isn't now. It's two-and-a-half hours long and moves pretty well but too much time is spent on the marriage of Jimmy Stewart-Vera Miles ("Chip and Lucy Ann Hardesty").

As one who watches a lot of modern- day crime movies, it was odd to see one with absolutely no profanity in it and very little blood, but that's because it's a 1959 film. We see the FBI cracking down on the KKK, anti- Native Americans, the Communists, spies, etc. Some of those parts are exciting, but nothing like when it came out almost 50 years ago. Now, it's almost ho-hum stuff.

For me now, this movie is more of a nostalgia piece than anything else. Frankly, I doubt if I would watch it again.

... and this little obscure piece of cinema history takes a book written about the FBI and turns it into two well told interwoven stories. One is the story of the life of one of the first FBI agents, the fictional John Hardesty (James Stewart) and his personal life through about 35 years as he marries and raises a family. The other is the story of the FBI from its infancy, told through the eyes and narration of Hardesty himself, covering several cases through the years including the Klan in the 20s, gangsters in the 30s, wartime espionage in the 40s, and then Communist espionage in the 50s. Vera Miles plays Hardesty's wife who does have her limits as the family is moved all over the country as Hardesty's assignments change.

One of the most interesting scenes to me is inside the Washington Bureau where dozens of women are in a big windowless concrete room filing stacks of correspondence by hand. That had to be mind numbing work.

I was surprised when I discovered the director was Mervyn LeRoy, because, although he directed some good ones over the years, he had a couple of bad habits. One was taking every single adapted play he directed and making it look like a play. In 1932 he actually changed scenes in one such film by having a curtain fall and then rise on another scene. The other bad habit was taking adapted books and have them play out like somebody is reading you the book - books on tape on film so to speak. This film, however, was done very well. But then I learned he and J. Edgar Hoover were friends, so maybe he had an extra incentive to have this one turn out well.

Agent Hardesty was certainly at the center of some big operations. The great irony of that being that J. Edgar was such a jealous guy that Hardesty would have spent a large part of his career in exile if he had been a real person with such a record of success. But then we would have no movie. So I found the secret to enjoying this film is to just forget about some of the actual truth that this film whitewashes over and enjoy it as an action/crime film of the time.

It can get a bit heavy handed and corny at times, but it holds up well due to the bigger than life talent of every man James Stewart.