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Undescribable Perfection

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

This is an astonishing documentary that will wring your heart while it bends your mind

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

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. Mal joins up with Carl Stephens and then gets himself involved with a married woman named Gail Mason, (Joanne Dru) and they fall madly in love with each other. 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. Enjoy.

After seeing this movie, you may not look at a telephone repairman the same way again. Actually the result seems closer to the Cagney films of the thirties than to the noirs of the forties. 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. Fortunately the always energetic O'Brien makes the transition from working stiff to bookie king-pin both dynamic and believable. 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. And in a usual thankless part, moon-faced Barry Kelley who bull-dozes everyone within reach through eyes so pinched, they're barely more than razor slits. Still, it's unheralded bit actors like him that really make movies like this work. Director Joe Newman keeps things moving nicely, even the colorless scenes featuring the forces of law and order don't bog down the pacing. There're also some good location shots in and around LA, with an exhausting climax up and down the the stairwells of Boulder Dam as the giant turbines hum in the background. (I wonder how they get ordinary people who probably just happened to be at the dam that day, to be so natural with a movie camera and crew staring them in the face. Somehow they do.) My favorite part is setting up the "past-posting" scheme, showing how every technical innovation presents a criminal mastermind with a twisted opportunity. All in all, 7-11 may not be a jack-pot dice roll, but it is a decent thriller, entertaining if not exactly memorable.

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. This film is quick, has good dialogue, and location shooting. 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. I agree however that the preachy ending might best be ignored.

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. When the gangster is shot to death by a poor schlub he's been squeezing for gambling debts, O'Brien takes over the operation. Suddenly several big boys from the "syndicate" back east come into Los Angeles to get a piece of the action. 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.