Un pruneau pour Joe

Edward G. Robinson and George Raft team up for the second and last time in A Bullet for Joey, a cold war noir espionage thriller set in Montreal.

Their first teaming as a memorable one. They co-starred in Manpower 14 years earlier and had a fistfight on the set over the affections of co-star Marlene Dietrich. Dietrich was involved with Raft at the time and Raft got jealous of Robinson who was a very cultured man and could talk to Dietrich about things that Raft knew little about.

A whole lot of water went under the bridge in the interim and there was no reported friction between the co-stars. Marlene had gone out of Raft's life and she was never in Robinson's at all.

Robinson's a Canadian R.C.M.P. inspector and he gets drawn into an investigation that involves the kidnapping of an atomic scientist George Dolenz and the device he's working on. A whole lot of dead bodies start turning up around Dolenz including a suspicious Mountie that starts the ball rolling.

Raft is a deported American gangster, living in Lisbon, who is recruited by Communist spy Peter Van Eyck to pull off the kidnapping. Raft sneaks into Canada, gets some of his old gang back together and proceeds on the job.

A Bullet for Joey proceeds on a parallel plot track with Raft putting together the kidnapping and Robinson working on a multiple homicide investigation.

Both Robinson and Raft were now B picture players. Robinson would make a big comeback the following year in The Ten Commandments. There was not to be a comeback for George Raft however.

Look for another good performance by Audrey Totter as the gang moll who Raft recruits to entice Dolenz. Totter graced many a B film back in the day competing with Veda Ann Borg for brassiest moll.

A Bullet for Joey is good noir film with a cast headed by two guys who knew their way around the genre. It's a cold war relic of a film, but I think can still be enjoyed by today's audience.

Not bad, but rather formulaic 50's crime/spy movie. However, it was redeemed by George Raft's delivery of one of the best and funniest lines I've ever heard. No spoilers here, but pay attention during the scenes between Robinson and Raft.

In Montreal, a police inspector (Edward G. Robinson) slowly discovers a plot to kidnap a nuclear physicist. American mobsters, foreign spies and a blonde seductress are all involved.

John Howard Reid considered the movie dull. He said a slow pace, one-dimensional characters, and an unconvincing climax plague the film. Sadly, I tend to think he is right. I was all invested the first ten or fifteen minutes, but found myself less interested as the movie went on.

I have a special fondness for George Raft, and an even bigger fondness for Edward G. Robinson, so you simply cannot go wrong with a film that has both men. And then adding all the film noir elements, along with spies and such, you have real potential. I just do not know if they actually reached it.

"Joey" (George Raft) arrives in Canada tasked with kidnapping a nuclear scientist on behalf of his nefarious principles. What he finds when he arrives is a rather messy state of affairs as there are already corpses mounting up and that's attracted the attention of the RCMP's finest inspector "Leduc" (Edward G. Robinson) who knows that the only thing connecting the deaths so far is the professor "Macklin" (George Dolenz). "Joey" re-assembles his old gang and that includes his ex "Joyce" (Audrey Totter) who is to try a more persuasive approach with the scientist - but one way or the other they are determined to get his secrets or himself. It's got a bit of an Cold War edge to it, this drama, and as the story develops we can see that the villain of the piece isn't fully aware of the ramifications of his task, nor of it's implications for the freedom loving nations of the world, and as the detective gets closer to tracking down who did what to whom and why, a crisis of conscience begins to trouble the unscrupulous gangster and that makes things way more perilous for just about everyone. There is not much jeopardy here and Raft is curiously underwhelming as the thrust of the plot is a little too contained by a more overt political message that rather dragged the story down. Totter also doesn't really deliver anything substantial and it takes until very near the end before it livens up enough to get Robinson out of his office and into the people smuggling racket. It's perfectly watchable but hasn't quite the bite of the usual Raft/Robinson characterisations and falls a bit flat.

A Bullet for Joey (1955)

There are some quirky oddball aspects to this film that keep it interesting--but only in spurts. First of all, there's George Raft, who is past his best days, but it's interesting all the same to see an actor with some great movies in his past. The whole strange premise of the movie, which gets a little lost in petty distractions, is about Communist spying, with a gangster (Raft) doing some gangstery things across the border--in Canada. The good guy is the inimitable Edward G. Robinson, who has a minor role despite his big billing.

What drags the movie is the basics--the story, and the direction. Lewis Allen has a couple of decent films to his credit--"Suddenly" is great, and so is "The Uninvited"--but the mundane settings and amorphous plot here are sometimes just dull. I think this is classic case of too many variables that didn't quite click, and Allen couldn't lift it up to something fabulous. As usual, the best scenes are good, but even the ending, with all its drama, doesn't quite click.