The Turning Point

The already overloaded bandwagon pulled to a groaning stop in front of the Paramount theatre this week to let The Turning Point show us how a professor named John Conroy would have handled the Kefauver Committee. In the process another unnamed, though typically midwestern city is purged of its civic bruises by the two fisted Conroy Crime Committee.

Conroy, played by Edmund O'Brien, is not alone in his civic duties. He is joined by William Holden's two-and-a-half fisted newspaperman, Jerry McKibben, a tough type who splits his time between platitudes and flirting with Conroy's girl friend, Alexis Smith.

The picture is poorly paced, foolishly interrupting some exciting, if stock, situations with a tiresome and totally irrelevant O'Brien, Smith, Holden triangle. There is no new angle in The Turning Point to give if the stature of the Emforcer, but had it eschewed love interest, and stuck to patient, relentless investigators, flustered, snarling gangsters, and sharp eyed, tough newspapermen, it might have been a pretty good film.

In sports Warren Duff's dialogue would be a credit to Mankiewiez. William Dietetle's direction shows near genius in the court room scenes, with Fd Regley, as the syndicate mastermind, radiating an injured innocence that makes Frank Costello look like a boy scout.