Review of Element of Danger

... At this point I've seen almost three seasons of Eliot Ness always making the smart move and yet here he brings in somebody he knows is a murderer and addicted to risk taking AND he turns the lights out in a room full of machine guns AND puts an unarmed young woman directly in front of the suspect AND makes him feel cornered and Ness is surprised at what happens??? Did anybody review this script??? But enough of my rant. That and I doubt that moviemaking technology was available on a small fast scale even to the feds during the early 1930s.

This episode is about an organization fronted by a legitimate chemical business that is converting opium to heroin and making a fortune. Ness and his men discover the warehouse full of opium when an agent who is actually on loan from the Chicago police is killed nearby. The culprit is the previously mentioned risk taker, in a terrifically raw explosive performance by Lee Marvin, that I mentioned in the first paragraph. He is partnered with rather buttoned down businessman Arnold Stegler (Victor Jory) who would like to rid himself of this powder keg of a person, and this is the conflict that Ness uses to trap everyone concerned. With Lee Marvin chewing enough scenery to make ecology an issue 60 years ago, and costarring Howard Culver as Mr. Science.