La casa de juego

It's oddly named because this movie really has nothing to do with a gambling house.

Gambler Marc Fury (Victor Mature) opens the film by staggering into his apartment, drops of blood marking his path, and collapsing on the floor after phoning a doc who will ask no questions. The doc patches him up while he tells what happened. He got caught in the crossfire between some guy and gambling house owner Joe Farrow (William Bendix), who actually shot the other guy dead.

Farrow makes a deal with Marc where Marc takes the blame for the killing, but pleads self defense, and in return Farrow will pay Mature $50,000 and provide Marc with his own attorney as counsel. Marc is cleared, but Farrow has no intention - or ability for that matter - of paying Marc the money. So he tips off the feds to something that even Marc doesn't know - Marc's Italian parents were never naturalized and thus Marc, born in Italy but brought to America as a toddler, is not a citizen. This makes him eligible for deportation. As a guy with a long criminal record, it doesn't look good for him.

This sends the movie into another direction entirely which detracts from the original noir flavor, but still is rather interesting - the plight of immigrants from recently war-torn Europe, how people take advantage, and the people here in America who help them, and in particular one attractive social worker and immigrant aide (Terry Moore) that brings up a romantic angle between two very unlikely people - herself and Marc. The deportation angle also allows hardened cynical Marc to realize what being an American means to him.

I ended up liking this more than I thought I would for lots of reasons - Mature tends to be a ham actor, the obvious age difference between Moore and Mature, and the immigrants shown being depicted as just too wide-eyed and naive for me to buy into it. And yet it works. I'd mildly recommend it, just realize this is not your proto-typical noir of the era.

As a previous commentator in this forum pointed out, this film has a very promising opening. One expects a tense and gritty film noir. However, the film soon drifts into a standard social drama about immigration laws and has little to do with crime or gambling until the end. With the excellent opening many people who watched this film were probably expecting something very different and were like me, disappointed.

The opening and closing images of this movie, directed by Ted Tetzlaff, fall firmly in the tradition of evocative noir staging and shooting. Too bad the bulk of the movie falls far short of that promise. Victor Mature, an operative in a gambling syndicate bossed by duplicitous William Bendix, eludes a rap but finds himself about to be deported. Squeakily wholesome Terry Moore, who works expediting such cases, falls for Mature (she's the primary female presence in the film, which cries out for a darker, more ambiguous woman). For long stretches it's unclear whether the script is about the inequalities of the immigration laws or about the dangers of organized gambling. A much grittier treatment of the same subject, from the same era, is The Lady Gambles, starring the First Lady of Film Noir, Barbara Stanwyck.

This is an interesting film which is part gangster film, part film noir, and part social drama. For those interested in how deportation was used in the 1950s to get rid of undesirables, it is very educational and seems pretty realistic. I think the biggest problem with the film is the casting of the three leads, Victor Mature, Terry Moore, and William Bendix.

Mature is surprisingly good as a gangster, but he really has a good nature and looks heroic, so it is hard to see him as a thug. Moore was 21 years old at the time of the movie and Mature was 37. This type of age difference is not unusual in Hollywood movies of this time, but unfortunately, Moore looks 18 years and talks like she is 16, and Mature looks in his 40s, so the blossoming love relationship between them seems misplaced. There were probably 50 actresses from 25-45 who would have been great with Mature, but Moore just seems in the wrong picture. Moore is great in other pictures, like "Mighty Joe Young," but at 21, she lacks the gravity to be a counter-balance to Mature's brooding performance. He is also about a foot taller than her. She looks like his daughter when she is next to him.

Worse, William Bendix, one of the great comic actors of this time plays the villain. Anybody who has seen him in his "Life of Riley" television series or other comic roles he has played in can only be disappointed that he plays the villain straight without any comic touches. He is not bad as the villain, but it does seem a waste of his talents.

It does move along fairly well and does generate some suspense in the key scenes. Don't go in with high expectations and you'll enjoy it.

The movie's a flawed crime drama that suffers from both miscasting and an unconvincing mixed message. Mature's Marc Fury (what a name!) is a racketeer threatened with deportation because he crossed the head racketeer (Bendix), who has connived effectively behind the scenes. In his efforts to avoid being sent back to a war-ravaged Europe, Marc romances a refugee worker Lynn Warren (Moore) who works with persons displaced by the war.

Unfortunately the bubbly Moore is only 21 in a part that calls for a much more mature looking actress, while actor Mature is a relatively advanced 37. As a result, the two don't match up well either physically or age-wise, making their pairing a real stretch for the movie.

But I suspect there's an interesting backstory to this production from RKO. Keep in mind this was about the time womanizer Howard Hughes purchased the studio. Moore, apparently, was one of his many favorites, while she claimed the two had secretly wed in 1950, the same year of this film. So I rather suspect Hughes was trying to boost her career by pairing her with one of Hollywood's biggest hunks, whether their pairing in the movie was credible or not. This is speculation on my part, but remains something to think about when viewing the film.

Now, crime dramas don't have to exclude political themes if those themes are artfully included. The trouble here is that Marc's sudden change of heart is neither persuasively dramatized nor subtly expressed. His final patriotic speech before the judge is more like a sermon than a confession, and shifts the whole weight of the film onto a last minute contrivance. But again, keep in mind, that Hughes was obsessed with the communist threat in 1950, so the artless message could well have originated in the headman's office.

In short, I see the movie's crippling compromises as the result of studio boss Hughes' particular preoccupations. Again, I can't claim anything more than conjecture, but at the same time, the points do have a circumstantial basis.

Where the movie succeeds is in giving the audience an idea of the plight of civilians displaced by the recently concluded war in Europe, and seeking a new life in America. This is now a largely forgotten aspect of the post-war period, but remains a wrenching aspect, movingly portrayed here by the Sobieski family.

All in all, the movie lacks impact as a crime drama and over-does the courtroom preachments. No wonder that whatever the good intentions, Gambling House has joined the ranks of the largely forgotten.