A Bullet for Joey

I have always been deceived every time I have watched this Lewis Allen film, I don't know why. Despite the fact that two heavies of the American crime film genre are together. Maybe because of the mix up between gangster element and the spy - cold war- one. But it remains worth seeking and seeing only for the presence of those two. I am not sure that they worked together besides.

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.

In Montreal, an organ grinder with a monkey kills a RCMP officer to avoid questioning. Inspector Leduc (Edward G. Robinson) slowly uncovers an international Communist plot to kidnap an important atomic physics scientist.

This is a little espionage thriller with EGR. It's ironic that he's hunting down a communist conspiracy in the movie while struggling with the communist witch-hunt in real life. It's a little slow. It's not cinematically exciting. The setting is Canada which doesn't mean much of anything visually. It could have done something with the local French but I don't think they do that back in the day. This movie needs a couple of action scenes early. There is a little bit of action at the end but it's barely anything and it's too little, too late.

"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.

After the FBI, the Post Office, and the NYPD, we travel north of the border to Montreal; where a police inspector (Edward G. Robinson) is suspicious about several deaths and a possible attempt to kidnap a nuclear physicist.

George Raft is the mobster doing a job for unknown masters to get money and back into the US. Audrey Totter is tapped to seduce the scientist to make the job easier.

Calling this noir is really stretching it. It doesn't have any of the dark seediness that one expects. It's more a straight police procedural.

Trotter is the most interesting character in the film. The rest just seem as if they are collecting paychecks.