The French Revolution as film noir? Pourquoi pas? In an effort to avoid the clichés of the historical costume drama, Anthony Mann and cinematographer Robert Alton cast Reign of Terror (retitled The Black Book) in the mold of their gangster films (its most famous line is given to Robespierre: "I told you never to call me Max"). The genre amalgam adds a disturbing element of determinism to the historical parade. Robert Cummings plays an emissary of Lafayette working undercover to effect the downfall of Robespierre; the key is a missing diary in which Robespierre has listed all those he has slated for the guillotine. Richard Basehart's Robespierre is a death's-head figure, white wig on powdered face. He is the incarnation of passionate evil, a kind of monstrous godfather operating out of sinister digs behind a bakery. Paris is a city of oblique angles and shadows, the politics of revolution a labyrinth of clandestine meetings, ruses and false loyalties; in 1949, the film is truest in mood to a contemporary "reign of terror," McCarthyism, with its black list. Not for nothing is Napoleon lurking in the shadows in the final scene, saying that the mark of a true Frenchman is his ability to know what is coming next.