Chicago Syndicate

This gripping, rarely screened drama finds an undercover accountant (O'Keefe) peering through Chicago's “carpet of complacency and inertia” (the narrator’s words) to root out a criminal operation led by the gentlemanly Paul Stewart. Essentially a gangster picture, the movie exhibits a noirish attitude toward its villain: Stewart’s kingpin is, like James Cagney’s hood in White Heat, just a mama’s boy gone bad, still sentimental about the house on Maxwell Street where he grew up. As in the more iconic Call Northside 777, the vintage location shooting is superb.