The best Joel McCrea’s crime movies

Mobster "Baby Face" Martin returns home to visit the New York neighborhood where he grew up, dropping in on his mother, who rejects him because of his gangster lifestyle, and his old girlfriend, Francey, now a syphilitic prostitute. Martin also crosses paths with Dave, a childhood friend struggling to make it as an architect, and the Dead End Kids, a gang of young boys roaming the streets of the city's East Side slums.

Western remake of High Sierra with Joel McCrea taking over the Humphrey Bogart role.

A producer takes over a small film studio and - sensing that it'll be a good movie- begins investigating an old murder of a silent film star shot in his office years ago. He finds that his life is threatened as he digs deeper into the mystery.

Ann Grey is wrongly convicted of murder. On her way to prison a car accident gives her the opportunity to escape. She is helped by young lawyer Tony Baxter. He hides her from the police, as well as his fiancée, with the help of his butler Peedles. Ann is also wanted by the mobsters who really committed the murder as they think she knows where $250,000 worth of bonds are hidden. When the mobsters find and abduct her, Tony enlists the help of the D.A. and the police to try to get her back.

The young Dr. Kildare treats and falls for impoverished ex-con Janet Healy, widow of a bank robber, who can't find her baby. Later she helps Kildare sew up gangster Hanlon in a tavern back room. Kildare pursues Janet and enlists Hanlon to help her; the gangster's solution, not surprisingly, is violent.

Fun little film about an egotistical crime writer who gets involved with the case of a notorious art thief (who is believed to be dead) while at the same time romancing a lovely young actress who's in a play that also happens to be the cover for massive jewel job. Art connoisseur and criminologist George Melville (Joel McCrea) is hired to track down art thieves, assisted by perky Claire Peyton (Jean Arthur) and goaded by Phil Bane (Thomas Mitchell), the roaring newspaper editor who has employed him. The mastermind poses as a theatrical impresario and stages a war drama, replete with loud explosions, to divert attention from his band of thieves, who are cracking safes in a bank adjacent to the theater.

An American military officer (Joel McCrea) and his wife (Evelyn Keyes) move to a cottage in what they think is the peaceful English countryside, only to discover the area is a hotbed of spies and secret agents. Director Robert Parrish's 1952 British espionage thriller--with a climax set at Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London--also stars Herbert Lom, Marius Goring, Roland Culver, Frank Lawton and Megs Jenkins.