Walk East on Beacon! (1952)

The Red Scare had reached a fever pitch when director Alfred L. Werker (He Walked by Night) adapted this tale of Communist spies stealing secrets about the Manhattan Project. The source material was a Reader's Digest article by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and the movie shares Hoover's obsession with surveillance, creating an atypical Noir focused on technology rather than obsessed with character psychology. But the film did make abundant use of the mean streets with over 14 weeks of location shooting throughout the northeast, thus providing a rare snapshot of an era in American life—its physical locations and its mental state.