THE F.B.I.
IN PEACE AND WAR
(AND MOVIES AND T.V.)

By Jim Doherty

 

It started out as an ad hoc outfit, put together mainly because Congress resented being investigated by federal cops. In those days, the only actual criminal investigators employed by the U.S. Government were agents of the U.S. Secret Service, a branch of the Treasury Department (there were U.S. Marshals working out of the Justice Department, but they weren't really investigators, per se). Since Secret Service operatives were the only professional investigative specialists on the federal payroll, they were often loaned out to other cabinet departments when needed. In 1906, for example, a group of Secret Service men were detailed to the Justice Department and directed to look into a land fraud case out west. In the course of recovering millions of acres of land that the taxpayers had been cheated out of, the Treasury Agents also uncovered some backroom chicanery that ended several political careers.

Congress responded, in 1908, with a law called the “Sundry Civil Service Act” which, among other things, strictly forbade the Secret Service from taking part in any law enforcement activity aside from the protection of the president and the suppression of counterfeiting U.S. currency.

President Theodore Roosevelt wasn't about to take that lying down. A former cop himself (he'd done some deputy sheriffing during his “frontier years” in the Dakotas, and, only a few years prior to succeeding to the presidency, had been a Commissioner of the New York City Police), he believed that a general service criminal investigation force was going to be a necessary part of the federal government in the coming years. Using as his authority an 1887 statute called the “Interstate Commerce Act,” which, among other things, gave the federal government the responsibility for interstate police work, Roosevelt summarily transferred a number of Secret Service agents (10 according to some accounts; more than 20 in others) from the Treasury Department to the Justice Department and ordered his attorney general, Charles Bonaparte, to organize them into a working detective force. Those agents reported to Bonaparte for duty on July 26, 1908, which is now regarded as the official birthdate of the agency that would eventually come to be known by the most famous set of initials in American law enforcement. The FBI.

In its early years, with no actual statutory authority other than that vague Interstate Commerce law, they tended to operate largely under the public radar, and it wasn't until the Depression, particularly under the administration of another Roosevelt named Franklin , that they started to become a force, not only for law and order, but for popular entertainment. The perfect storm of the adoption of New Deal (which included a piece of legislation called the “Omnibus Crime Act” that greatly expanded the Bureau's powers), the activities of headline-making gangsters like John Dillinger and “Pretty Boy” Floyd who operated across state lines, and the rise of mass communication mediums like radio, talking pictures, pulp magazines, etc., created a situation in which the crime-busting activities of FBI agents were ripe for dramatization.

Since the Bureau is celebrating its hundredth anniversary this year, and since its influence on hard-boiled and noir crime fiction, in many mediums, is pretty pronounced, I'm devoting this issue's column to it. The Bureau's effect on the entire spectrum of pop culture is too broad a subject to be covered in a single article, so I'm limiting this one to my favorite FBI films and television shows.

MOVIES

1) “G” Men (Warner Brothers, 1935); written by Seton I. Miller; directed by William Keighley.

Hoofer-turned-tough-guy James Cagney went from gangster to gangbuster in this rip-snorting action film, the grand-daddy of all FBI flicks. As Brick Davis, a young lawyer who joins the FBI after his best friend, a Bureau agent, is killed in the line of duty, Cagney's on hand for fictionalized dramatizations of such real-life events as the Kansas City Massacre, the assault on the Little Bohemia Lodge in Wisconsin that was being used as a hideout by gangsters (a Depression-era counterpart to Waco or Ruby Ridge that the film turns into a triumphant moment for the Bureau), and the passage of the Omnibus Crime Bill that expanded the Bureau's powers and jurisdiction. Along the way he wipes out Midwest gangdom almost single-handedly, slays the dragon (Barton MacLane), rescues the girl (Margaret Lindsay), and wins over his skeptical boss (Robert Armstrong). The phenomenal success of this film led to a wave of similar “G-Man” pictures, including but not limited to Public Hero # 1 (MGM, 1935), Let ‘Em Have It (United Artists, 1935), Show ‘Em No Mercy (20th/Fox, 1935), 36 Hours to Kill (20 th /Fox, 1936), Trapped by G-Men (Columbia, 1937), When G-Men Step In (Columbia, 1938), Border G-Man (RKO, 1938), and Persons in Hiding (Paramount, 1939).

2) Confessions of a Nazi Spy (Warner Brothers, 1939); written by Milton Krims and John Wexley, based on the book Nazi Spies in America (Random, 1939) by Leon Turrou; directed by Anatole Litvak.

In 1938, Agent Leon Turrou, one of the FBI's top criminal investigators, was assigned to break a Nazi spy ring operating out of New York . It was the first major counter-espionage case the Bureau handled and, if it wasn't an unqualified success, it did lead to several arrests and convictions. After the conclusion of the case, Turrou retired to write a book about it (or, if you believe the Bureau version, was fired for writing a book about it). In either case, Warner Brothers bought the film rights to the book while it was still being serialized in the New York Post , hired Turrou to act as a technical advisor, and cast Edward G. Robinson as Agent Ed Renard, a fictionalized version of Turrou. Renard's on the trail of an espionage cell led by Francis Lederer, George Sanders, and Paul Lukas, and, against all odds, he breaks it wide open (in real life the results were a little more ambiguous; some of the biggest fish escaped to Germany because of mistakes Turrou made). Warners was subjected to a lot of pressure for actually identifying Nazi Germany as the employer of the enemy agents (though the war had been raging since 1937 in Asia and had spread to Europe by 1939, the US was still officially neutral), but the studio stuck to its guns, making it clear in the script that the Axis, and particularly Germany, was the Enemy, and the result is a top-notch melding of cops-and-robbers with cloak-and-dagger.

3) Dick Tracy's G-Men (Republic Pictures, 1939); written by Barry Shipman, Franklin Adreon, Rex Taylor, Ronald Davidson, and Sol Shor, based on the character created by Chester Gould; directed by William Witney and John English.

Regular readers of this column will recall my devotion to Dick Tracy. When the square-jawed copper first made the jump to film in four Republic movie serials, he was, for some unknown reason, transformed from the Midwest city police detective he was in the funny papers into an FBI agent in California . In this entry, the third in the series, our hero (played by Ralph Byrd, who made something of a career out of playing Tracy ) is on the trail of Nicolas Zarnoff (Irving Pichel, in a great performance), enemy agent and saboteur. Perhaps to avoid the sort of controversy generated by Confessions of a Nazi Spy , Zarnoff's employers were never specifically identified. Instead, Zarnoff reports to representatives of “The Three Powers,” though it must have been clear to anyone who read a newspaper that this was a thinly veiled reference to the Axis. The Tracy serials are among the best chapterplays ever made, and this one is the best of the whole Tracy series, with Witney and English, celebrated by serial fans as the best directors specializing in cliffhangers, keeping things moving at a rapid pace. It also has a few subtle touches one wouldn't expect to see in a serial. The first chapter, for example, begins with a newsreel that gives a lot of Zarnoff's back-story, a framing device that Orson Welles would use two years later in Citizen Kane (RKO, 1941). And, as a trivia note, it also features, in a small but notable supporting role, a lovely young actress named Phyllis Isley who, in her next picture, The Song of Bernadette (20 th /Fox, 1943), changed her name to Jennifer Jones and walked off with the Oscar.

4) Walk East on Beacon! (Columbia Pictures, 1952); written by Leo Rosten, Virginia Shaler, Leonard Heideman, and Emmett Murphy, based on the article “The Crime of the Century” ( Reader's Digest , May 1951) by J. Edgar Hoover; directed by Alfred Werker.

Any article devoted to the most significant movies about the FBI is sure to mention producer Louis de Rochemont, the documentary filmmaker famous for 20 th Century Fox's March of Time newsreels. De Rochemont moved into dramatic features in 1945 with a film based on one of the FBI's most famous cases. Using documentary techniques to heighten the sense of authenticity, he developed a new kind of dramatic film, what came to called the “semi-documentary,” an important step in the development of the crime fiction's police procedural sub-genre. Ultimately, de Rochemont would make three films dramatizing Bureau cases. The first, The House on 92 nd Street (20 th /Fox, 1945), based on the Bureau's break-up of the Nazi spy ring led by Fritz Duquesne, won screenwriter Charles Booth an Oscar. The second, The Street with No Name (20 th /Fox, 1948), about the Bureau's campaign against post-war gangsterism in the Midwest, was nominated for a Screen Writers' Guild award, and featured a chilling performance by Richard Widmark as the main crime czar. I felt that listing all three films would be a little excessive, and, since both the Bureau's gangbusting activities and its fight against Axis espionage have been covered by other films on this list, I decided that the de Rochemont film I'd talk about in this article would be the third entry in the trilogy, Walk East on Beacon! , which dealt with Hoover's main post-war priority (some would say Hoover's post-war obsession), domestic counter-espionage during the Cold War. Very loosely based on the “Atomic Spy” case that pitted the Bureau against such traitorous figures as Klaus Fuchs, Harry Gold, and the Rosenbergs, the “macguffin” in this film is changed from the plans for the atomic bomb to a complicated mathematical formula that, rather presciently, may make space-based defensive weapons possible. The formula has been developed by immigrant scientist Albert Kafer (Finlay Currie), and the commies want it very badly. FBI Inspector Jim Belden (George Murphy, in his last screen role) wants just as badly to keep it out of their hands. Louisa Horton and future Oscar-winning director George Roy Hill register strongly in small, but substantial supporting roles as housewife who's also an intensely committed Marxist and her collaborationist husband, who are both involved in the espionage plot, characters apparently inspired by Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Released during the height of the Red Scare, the film has little of the hysterical demagoguery found in similar films like The Red Menace (Republic, 1949), The Woman on Pier 13 (RKO, 1949), or I Was a Communist for the FBI (Warners, 1951). Instead it takes an understated approach, which serves both to heighten suspense, and to make its anti-communist point more effectively. Unlike its two predecessors, it didn't win any awards. Despite that, it is, in many respects, the best of de Rochemont's “FBI Trilogy.”

5) The FBI Story (Warner Brothers, 1959); written by Richard L. Breen and John Twist, based on the book by Don Whitehead; directed by Mervyn LeRoy.

Hoover-approved Bureau propaganda based on the Hoover-approved best-seller, but a solidly entertaining film nonetheless, it charts the growth of the FBI through the experiences of one fictional agent, Chip Hardesty (James Stewart), who happens to be conveniently on hand for all of the Bureau's most famous cases, including the Osage Indian Murder Case in the ‘20's, the Midwest “War on Crime” in the ‘30's, the fight against the Nazis in the ‘40's, and the Soviet atomic spy case in the ‘50's. Vera Miles plays Stewart's stalwart wife, and Murray Hamilton his partner.

6) Experiment in Terror (Columbia Pictures, 1962); written by the Gordons, based on their novel Operation Terror (Doubleday, 1961); directed by Blake Edwards.

The Gordons' series character, FBI Agent John “Rip” Ripley, is brought to life by Glenn Ford in this tight, suspenseful film, coming late in the classic noir cycle, which pits him against Red Lynch (Ross Martin), bank robber, kidnapper, extortionist, and sex killer. Lynch's latest criminal enterprise is terrorizing bank teller Kelly Sherwood (Lee Remick) by threatening her teen-aged kid sister (Stefanie Powers) with rape and murder unless Kelly helps him loot the bank she works at. Great use of San Francisco locations. Top-notch direction by Blake Edwards, very reminiscent of his work on the TV series Peter Gunn (NBC 1958-60, ABC 1960-61). In an earlier film, Down Three Dark Streets (United Artists, 1954), adapted by the Gordons from their novel Case File: FBI (Doubleday, 1953), the quiet, slender, contemplative Ripley was played by bluff, burly Broderick Crawford. Ford was much closer to the character as depicted in the Gordons' books. Prior to collaborating on crime novels with his wife Mildred, Gordon Gordon (that was actually his name) spent three years as an FBI agent, working counter-espionage cases out of the Bureau's Chicago Field Office during World War II, so the Ripley novels are an early example of a professional cop making use of his experiences for fiction.

7) Dillinger (American International Pictures, 1973); written and directed by John Milius.

The FBI's single most famous case, the pursuit of the notorious bank robber who came to symbolize the entire Depression era, is fictionalized in this hard-hitting film starring Warren Oates as John Dillinger and Ben Johnson as Melvin Purvis, the head of the FBI's Chicago Field Office, who made the apprehension of Dillinger his personal crusade. Historically dubious, it makes up in action, pace, and colorful performances what it lacks in factual accuracy. Clarence Hurt, one of the agents who actually shot it out with Dillinger near Chicago's Biograph Theatre, was the uncredited technical advisor on this film, and it's very likely that the characterization of Purvis offered by tall, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, ruggedly handsome Oklahoman Johnson owes more to tall, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, ruggedly handsome Oklahoman Hurt than it does to the short, slightly-built, soft-spoken Virginia gentleman that Purvis was in real life. Apparently, the script was loosely based on Purvis's autobiography, American Agent (Doubleday, 1936), as the voice-over narration by Johnson as Purvis would seem to indicate, but Purvis is not credited as the author of the source material. Writer-director Milius went on to co-write one made-for-TV “prequel” (or, perhaps more correctly, “in-between-quel”), Melvin Purvis – G-Man (ABC, 1974), which, in turn, was popular enough to lead to a second TV-film, The Kansas City Massacre (ABC, 1975). Dale Robertson replaced Johnson as the legendary fed in both television productions. An upcoming film from Universal that will revisit the Purvis/Dillinger duel, Public Enemies , is set for release in 2009. It is being directed by Michael Mann, of Miami Vice (NBC, 1984-89), Crime Story (NBC, 1986-88), Heat (Warners, 1995), and (as we'll see) Manhunter fame, and will star Christian Bale as Purvis and Johnny Depp as Dillinger.

8) Manhunter (De Laurentiis Entertainment Group, 1986); written and directed by Michael Mann, based on the novel Red Dragon (Putnam, 1981) by Thomas Harris.

In much the same way that I felt I should list only one film from Louis de Rochemont's “Bureau Trilogy,” I felt that I could only list one film based on Thomas Harris's novels about the Bureau's ongoing duel with Dr. Hannibal Lecter. So, without in any way diminishing my admiration for the Oscar-winning The Silence of the Lambs (Orion, 1991), I would, if forced to make a choice, have to say that its predecessor, Manhunter , is the better of the two films. William Peterson plays former FBI Agent Will Graham, forensics expert and supernaturally accurate criminal profiler, who's called out of retirement to help his old boss, Agent Jack Crawford, track down a serial killer called “The Tooth Fairy,” who, like some real-life werewolf, is slaughtering entire families every time there's a full moon. Graham, in turn, consults with his old nemesis, the incarcerated Dr. Lecter (spelled Lecktor in this film), in order to get back the mindset he needs to put himself inside the skin of the killer he is tracking. Brian Cox plays Lecter, and Anthony Hopkins's Oscar notwithstanding, Cox's chilling performance is more compelling. Peterson is appropriately haunted as Graham. Former cop Dennis Farina as Crawford is totally convincing. And Tom Noonan is absolutely frightening as Francis Dolarhyde, the deranged murderer the cops know only as “The Tooth Fairy.” One sequence stands out as a suspense set piece. The Bureau has obtained a letter from Dolarhyde to Lecter. They only have a limited time to work it for trace evidence before returning it so Lecter will not know what they have discovered. It's hard to imagine that a bunch of lab geeks doing their thing could be so suspenseful, but it is. This film, and particularly that scene, were probably instrumental in Peterson's getting the lead in C.S.I. (CBS, 2000-Present). Following Anthony Hopkins's success as Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs , Manhunter was remade as Red Dragon (Universal, 2002), with Anthony Hopkins reprising his award-winning role, and Edward Norton cast as Graham. Like most remakes, it wasn't as good as the original.

9) Mississippi Burning (Orion Pictures, 1988); written by Chris Gerolmo; directed by Alan Parker.

Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe as FBI Agents Rupert Anderson and Alan Ward, two investigators with very different styles, lead the efforts to nail the murderers of three civil rights workers in this compelling dramatization of the notorious 1964 case that pitted the Bureau against its long-time nemesis, the Ku Klux Klan. Gripping, superbly acted, visually arresting, this is clearly one of the all-time great FBI pictures. Hackman was nominated for an Oscar for his performance, as was Frances McDormand as the wife of a local policeman involved in the murder conspiracy, and the film itself was nominated for Best Picture. It won a well-deserved Oscar for Best Cinematography. All that said, the film, being a fictionalization of the actual case, did depart from the facts of the case in a number of ways, and was widely criticized for this. However, its departures, made to suit the dramatic needs of the story, were no greater than in any other fictional depictions of real-life events (and far less than most), and the criticism in this case, coming on the heels of generally high critical praise, seemed to stem less from the film's lack of fidelity to the actual events, than from the fact that it depicted the FBI as the heroes in a case of such importance to the civil rights movement. This, apparently, disturbed the political sensibilities of certain commentators. Well, political sensibilities notwithstanding, the FBI agents were heroes in this case. They solved three murders that local authorities not only wouldn't investigate, but in which local authorities were complicit, and that's one fact the film did get right. Mississippi Burning is not the only film to dramatize the case. An earlier, two-part TV-movie, Attack on Terror (CBS, 1975), based on a non-fiction book about the investigation by Don Whitehead, was also quite good, and perhaps stuck a little closer to the facts. And a later TV-movie, Murder in Mississippi (NBC, 1990), dramatized the events leading up to the murder.

10) Donnie Brasco (TriStar Pictures, 1997); written Paul Attanasio, based on the book by Joseph D. Pistone and Richard Woodley; directed by Mike Newell.

In 1976, Special Agent Joe Pistone, a veteran of seven years service in the FBI, was issued a set of documents that identified him by the alias “Donald Brasco,” and assigned to infiltrate a gang of truck hijackers. It was an operation that was supposed to last six months. Unexpectedly, Pistone got swept up deeply into the operations of the Bonanno crime family in New York , and wound up in an undercover investigation that would last six years . On the verge of his actually being inducted as a full-fledged member of the Mafia, a “made man,” the plug was pulled on his investigation and over 200 arrests, followed by 100 convictions, were made, effectively crippling the entire Bonanno operation. Pistone wrote about his experiences in his autobiography, Donnie Brasco – My Undercover Life in the Mafia (Hodder & Stoughton, 1999), which this film dramatizes. Johnny Depp plays Pistone in a nuanced, understated way that is far superior to his over-the-top performance in Pirates of the Carribean , for all that the latter brought him an Oscar nomination. Al Pacino, who's made something of a career out of playing mobsters, gives perhaps his best gangster performance, Michael Corleone in the Godfather Trilogy not excepted, as Pistone/Brasco's mentor in the Mafia, Lefty Ruggiero. Anne Heche gives an award-worthy performance in as Pistone's wife. And Michael Madsen is intimidating as middle-management Mafioso Dominick “Sonny Black” Napolitano, to whom both Ruggiero and Brasco report. Almost certainly the best film ever made about the FBI's operations against organized crime. A TV series, entitled Falcone (CBS, 2000), also fictionalized Pistone's years as an undercover agent. For copyright reasons, though Pistone's real name was used in the series, his mobster alias was changed from “Donnie Brasco” to “Joe Falcone.” Falcone was a solid series, that earned nominations for several awards including two Emmys, but it didn't last long, and is not nearly as well-remembered as its feature-length predecessor.

TELEVISION SERIES

1) The Untouchables (ABC, 1959-63)

I might be stretching a point here. On the FBI's official website, it's asserted that, widely-held beliefs notwithstanding, Eliot Ness was never a member of the FBI. That's not altogether true, though. Actually, at least on paper, Ness was an FBI agent, for a few months anyway, until Prohibition ended and the semi-autonomous branch of the Bureau he was in was transferred en masse to Treasury where it became the precursor of the ATF. Be that as it may, on this series, Ness and the men of his “special squad” acted like FBI men, regularly going after bank robbers, kidnappers, interstate truck hijackers, train robbers, Nazi spies, etc., in addition to the bootleggers he chased in real life. Occasionally, he'd even be depicted as the man responsible for bringing in some of the Bureau's most famous foes (“Ma” Barker and her boys, for instance, in an episode that reportedly enraged J. Edgar Hoover). Moreover, except for the pilot episode, a two-part serial shown on Desilu Playhouse , which specifically identified him as an agent of the Prohibition Bureau (a separate branch of the Justice Department until it was briefly absorbed into the FBI), Ness was always referred to as just a generic “federal agent,” which, in the minds of most of the public, was synonymous with “FBI man.” Finally, it was set in the 1930's, the decade in which the Bureau became a pop culture icon. Robert Stack's flinty portrayal of the fabled Depression-era super-cop, the lovingly rendered period details, the gallery of scenery-chewing hoods played by such fine actors as Bruce Gordon, Nehemiah Persoff, Claire Trevor, Lee Marvin, and dozens of others, and the unflinchingly violent set pieces made this show legendary. Nearly 50 years later, it's still one of the most successful shows in syndication. A later series, syndicated to local stations from 1993 to 1994, like the 1987 Paramount film, depicted Ness as a Treasury Agent (which he wasn't at the time of the Capone investigation), and, in consequence, put themselves out of consideration for either list.

2) The FBI (ABC, 1965-74)

Like The FBI Story , this was Hooverized Bureau propaganda, but like The FBI Story , it was also a well-acted, well-written, well-crafted crime drama that consistently and deservedly drew viewers for nine years. Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., played Inspector Lew Erskine, the Bureau's “chief investigator,” who works out of the FBI's Washington headquarters, but is sent all over the country on special cases (probably modeled on real-life Major Case Inspector Joseph Sullivan). Over the years, he worked with three different partners, Agent Jim Rhodes (Stephen Colby), Agent Tom Colby (William Reynolds), and Agent Chris Daniels (Shelly Novack). Throughout the run of the series, Erskine and his various sidekicks reported to Assistant Director Arthur Ward (Philip Abbott). Major stars of the past, like Walter Pidgeon and Jessica Tandy, and of the future, like Gene Hackman and Robert Duvall, were regularly cast in guest roles. Probably the single most successful series to come out legendary TV producer Quinn Martin's stable. The Fox Network is, reportedly, planning a revival of this series, or at least is planning a series with the same title, later this year or early next.

3) Today's FBI (ABC, 1981-82)

Almost seven years after The FBI left the air, ABC hoped lightning would strike twice with another Sunday night series about the Bureau. This time the veteran agent (Deputy Assistant Director Ben Slater played by Mike Connors) was assisted by four younger agents, who together formed a “special investigative squad” a la The Untouchables . The series was produced by David Gerber, who also helmed such well-thought-of cop shows as Police Story (NBC, 1973-79), Eischied (NBC, 1979-80), Cade's County (CBS, 1971-72), and Lady Blue (ABC, 1985-86).

4) Wiseguy (CBS, 1987-90)

Ken Wahl set female hearts a-fluttering with his performance as hunky undercover FBI Agent Vinnie Terranova, whose specialty was burrowing deep into the center of criminal enterprises to bring them down from the inside, a character probably inspired by, if not directly based on, Joe Pistone (whose own story was, as noted above, dramatized in Donnie Brasco , the film version of his book, and in the TV series Falcone ), and, to a lesser degree, New Jersey State Trooper Bob Delaney, who told the story of his infiltration of the Jersey mob in his autobiography Covert (Union Square, 2008). The show was constructed as a series of what came to be called “arcs,” a set of self-contained episodes that together formed a larger story. In the first, probably longest, and certainly best-remembered arc, Terranova infiltrates the Mafia family run by New Jersey mobster Sonny Steelgrave (Ray Sharkey), rises rapidly in the ranks, and, against his better judgment, develops a strong affection for the ruthless, but charming and unflaggingly loyal gangster. After successfully bringing Steelgrave down, Terranova suffered guilt pangs that lasted for virtually the rest of the series. Other criminals targeted by Terranova over the course of the show included international arms dealer Mel Proffitt (Kevin Spacey), white supremacists Knox Pooley (Fred Thompson) and Calvin Hollis (Paul Guilfoyle), and music industry racketeer Winston Newquay (Tim Curry). The rest of Terranova's team consisted of his supervisor, Frank McPike (Jonathan Banks), and his communications contact, Daniel “Lifeguard” Burroughs (Jim Byrnes). One of the very best series put out by Stephen J, Cannell, well-known producer-creator of such top crime shows as The Rockford Files (NBC 1974-80), Tenspeed and Brown Shoe (ABC, 1980), Hunter (NBC, 1984-91), and The Commish (ABC, 1991-95). During the last (and least) season, Terranova was written out of the series as having been murdered, and was replaced by disbarred Cuban-American lawyer Michael Santana (Steven Bauer). However, Wahl was brought back as Terranova in a one-shot 1996 TV-movie, still working with McPike and “Lifeguard,” a resurrection that apparently rendered the entire last season null and void.

5) Mancuso – FBI (NBC, 1989-90)

The character of crusty, hard-nosed veteran Special Agent Joe Mancuso was first introduced in Steve Sohmer's political thriller Favorite Son (Bantam, 1987). When the novel was filmed as a multi-part TV-movie, broadcast on NBC in 1988, the character's name was changed to Nick, and the actor who played him was Robert Loggia. The movie got good enough ratings to justify a regular weekly series about the old-school G-Man, with Loggia wisely retained in the role. Nick Mancuso was the kind of idealistic, true-believing fed who'd tell his supervisor, with complete sincerity, “What we do isn't about politics! It's about right and wrong!” And Loggia was the kind of actor who could recite that line and make you believe it. While the show was generally well-crafted and well-written, it was Loggia's performance that made what would have been a merely above-average series “must-see TV.” Regretfully, it only lasted a single season, though NBC aired reruns of several of the best episodes as a summer replacement several years after the original show was cancelled. Co-starring Fredric Lehne as Mancuso's arrogant, politically ambitious young boss, Lindsey Frost as Mancuso's rookie partner, and Randi Brooks as a secretary at Mancuso's office.

6) FBI – The Untold Stories (ABC, 1991-93)

Surprisingly good half-hour anthology drama in which dramatizations of actual FBI cases were narrated, in the manner of Top Cops (CBS, 1990-93), by the real-life agents involved in the investigations. Pernell Roberts hosted the show.

7) The X-Files (Fox, 1993-2002)

It's rather interesting to think that, with the exception of The FBI , The X-Files was the most popular TV series ever to feature the Bureau. It lasted the same number of seasons (9), and almost as many episodes (202 to 238), and it earned a high enough viewership to move its network out of the minor leagues and into The Big Show. And, on paper at least, it was such an oddball idea for a TV program. If one was pitching it to a network exec, the high-concept description might go something like this. “It's sort of a cross between The FBI and Kolchak – The Night Stalker .” That sounds about as workable a combination as pepperoni and chocolate syrup, two great things that just don't go together. But it worked marvelously, and deserved every bit of its success. Like The FBI , it featured a team of two FBI agents who traveled all over the country solving special cases, and, like Kolchak (ABC, 1973-74), the criminals they pursued in each episode all had a supernatural or science fictional element. The two agents were Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). Episodes generally fell into two different categories. Some were simply stand-alone “monster-of-the-week” stories, in which Mulder and Scully targeted a bad guy who also happened to be a vampire , a werewolf, a zombie, or some other paranormal refugee from a 1930's Universal horror film. The rest were chapters in a larger story, referred to by fans as the “mytharc,” involving the agents' efforts to discover the truth behind a monstrous conspiracy involving high-ranking government officials who were, apparently, colluding with evil invaders from outer space. The chief conspirator seemed to be a mysterious figure referred to as the “The Cigarette Smoking Man” (William B. Davis). Speaking for myself, I always preferred the stand-alone episodes. Unless you were really dedicated, it was just too damned hard to keep up with all the plot complications in the years-long “mytharc.” In later seasons, Mulder's appearances became more infrequent, and a new pair of agents, John Doggett (Robert Patrick) and Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish) were introduced to carry the load. All of the agents reported to Assistant Director Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi), a sympathetic but compromised higher-up in the Bureau. The surprise success of the show led to a short-lived spin-off, The Lone Gunmen (Fox, 2001), featuring a trio of Mulder's informants, and two feature-length movies, The X-Files – Fight the Future (20 th /Fox, 1998) and The X-Files – I Want to Believe (20 th /Fox, 2008).

8) C-16 (ABC, 1997-98)

Eric Roberts starred in this short-lived but well-made series as John Olansky, the supervising special agent in charge of C-16, the critical response squad of the FBI's Los Angeles Field Office. Angie Harmon, in one of her first TV jobs, co-starred as Amanda Reardon, a rookie agent assigned to Olansky's unit. Other members included Zach Grenier as grizzled veteran Jack DiRado, Morris Chestnut as Mal Robinson, another new recruit, and D.B. Sweeney as hotshot Scott Stoddard. Well-written, well-acted, with a good chemistry among the fairly large cast, it failed to find an audience and only lasted for 13 episodes. Noteworthy for being one of the first TV series to be shot wide-screen.

9) Cover Me ( USA , 2000-01)

If the high-concept description of The X-Files was “a cross between The FBI and Kolchak – The Night Stalker ,” the high-concept description of this show, created and produced by one-time Hardy Boy Shaun Cassidy, might have been “a cross between Wiseguy and The Wonder Years .” Like Wiseguy , it featured an FBI agent whose specialty was the undercover infiltration of organized crime. But Special Agent Danny Arno (Peter Dobson) wasn't just an undercover cop. He was a happily married husband and father, and his method for keeping his family safe was involving them as operatives in his investigations so he could keep an eye on them while working. Like The Wonder Years (ABC, 1988-93), it was narrated by one of the dad's kids, now an adult looking back at his childhood. In this case, the viewpoint character reminiscing about growing up as a “Bureau brat” was Arno 's youngest child, Chance (Michael Angarano). The rest of the family consisted of Arno 's smokin' hot wife, Barbara (Melora Hardin), his smokin' hot older daughter, Celeste (Cameron Richardson), and his smokin' hot younger daughter, Ruby (Antoinette Picano). Supposedly inspired by actual cases, it was claimed in the opening credits that the series was “Based on the True Life of an FBI Family,” and real-life Bureau brats Cory Patrick Brown, Carolyn Brown Brannon, and Laura Brown, the children of FBI Agent Ken Brown, were listed as consultants and originators of the source material. Be that as it may, the whole notion seemed so incredible that it made the idea of a pair of agents who traveled the country searching for fugitive vampires and serial-killing spacemen almost believable. Incredible or not, it was highly entertaining and original take on what a career in the FBI was like, and how that career affected the agent's family.

10) Line of Fire (ABC, 2003-04)

Set in Richmond , this series depicted the on-going conflict between Lisa Cohen (Leslie Hope), the Special Agent in Charge of the FBI's Virginia Field Office, and Jonah Malloy (David Paymer), Richmond 's top organized crime figure, a conflict that is intensified when both an agent and a gangster are killed in a gun battle during the pilot episode. Along with the two “generals” in this war between feds and felons, the back-stories of the foot soldiers are also developed. On the Bureau side, there's a suburban mother who's having trouble juggling her maternal responsibilities and her law enforcement career, a rookie agent whose husband was killed during the 9/11 attacks, another rookie who's using his Bureau job as a stepping stone to a political career, and an agent suffering guilt pangs over the aforementioned murder of his partner. On the Mob side, there's Malloy's second-in-command, whose African-American wife is the madam at one of Malloy's bordellos, Malloy's own wife whose best friend is that same madam, and Malloy's grimly efficient enforcers. The intersection between the two groups was undercover agent Roy Ravelle (Anson Mount), who, Wiseguy -like, has spent two years in prison establishing his bona fides as a genuine criminal so he can infiltrate Malloy's organization. A mid-season replacement scheduled to fill the timeslot of NYPD Blue (ABC, 1993-2005) while that show was on temporary hiatus, it only lasted 13 episodes, but, in that short time, depicted a most interesting duel between professional law officers and professional lawbreakers.

 

Of course, the Bureau's effect on popular culture isn't limited to movies and television. Stories featuring G-Men heroes appeared regularly in the pages of pulp magazines like Black Mask , Dime Detective , and Detective Fiction Weekly , and soon entire pulp magazines were devoted to the adventures of FBI agents, such as G-Men Detective , The Feds , and FBI Detective Stories . Comic strips like the Dashiell Hammett-created Secret Agent X-9 , the Hoover-approved War on Crime helped keep newspaper circulation high. Comic book features like “Federal Men,” created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (who'd gain somewhat greater fame with a character called Superman ) for DC's Adventure Comics , and Little Al of the FBI were routine attractions on newsstands throughout the country. Radio dramas like G-Men (which soon morphed into Gangbusters ), The FBI in Peace and War , and This Is Your FBI were popular features on the audio airwaves for years.

And, of course, there were, and still are, novels featuring FBI agents.

But arguably, film and TV is where the Bureau made its greatest pop culture inroads, and, in this article, I've barely scratched the surface.