A LESSON FROM MR. CRAWFORD. Caught The Mob last week on Turner -- a slightly cheesy but tight little 1951 crime pic in which Broderick Crawford plays a cop who goes undercover as a dockworker to solve a case. It's very butch entertainment, with Ernest Borgnine and John Marley as goons, Richard Kiley and Matt Crowley as wiseguys with secrets, wonderfully cruddy cityscapes, and hopelessly flat female characters. At one point the cops trace a car by attaching a slow drip of some sort of liquid to the chassis: they ride a good distance behind the suspect, shining a black light on the road to follow the otherwise invisible trail. I can imagine a theatre full of 50s boys goggle-eyed at this high tech police work.

I fixated on Crawford. Most physically heavy actors who work well on film -- Zero Mostel, Victor Buono, and Oliver Hardy come to mind -- seem light on their feet, but Crawford never did. His weightiness made him a hard sell as a leading man. As did his mug: cruel mouth, small eyes, fat cheeks, broken nose. (Crawford described it as "the face of a retired pugilist.") But he had a surprising expressive range as an actor -- check him out as the professor of medicine in Not as a Stranger, where his toughness plays as stoic wisdom.

And he gives a neat little acting lesson in The Mob. As the cop, Crawford seems at first like a bit of a stiff, a conscientious lifer who just wants to do right by his job and his girl. His usual gruff voice seems a little cowed and worried. Then circumstances necessitate his transformation into a belligerent drifter. He walks into a dockside flophouse with his hat pulled down, one hand dug into his pocket, the other swinging a crummy valise, and the rolling gait of a guy used to having nowhere to go. He regards every person and object that falls under his gaze with weary insolence. He talks to the desk clerk and the bartender as if he expects nothing and wants everything. Olivier couldn't have done it better. He couldn't have done it as well.

As a teenager I saw Crawford give a rather lax performance at the Westport County Playhouse as the Coach in That Championship Season. The Playhouse had notoriously short rehearsal schedules and, from what I'd heard about him, I doubt Crawford threw himself into his work. Why would he? He'd been doing TV for decades. He knew the game. So he hit his marks and said his lines. At the end, though, standing down left with the trophy clutched in his hands, he listed to one side and fixed his eyes -- those tiny eyes, nestled in creases -- at the third row. He suddenly looked like three hundred pounds of dead meat. "Basketball," he rasped, "is no longer the white man's game." The audience laughed and his aging players took pictures. Up till then Crawford seemed a little off; now he seemed a million miles away. "I got you, Coach," yelled the photographer. The pile of meat stirred; a sigh. "Yeah." I can still hear it: The low string on a cello, frayed and woolly.