Gambling House

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 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.

Heads up: I like watching Victor Mature, a most unassuming actor of undeniable quality. In GAMBLING HOUSE, he posts yet another solid performance, well backed up by that frequent villain, Willliam Bendix. Sadly, cute little Terry Moore comes nowhere near those two, and the actors who portray the members of the immigrant Sobieski family come across as even more amateurish than Moore.

Good direction, action sequences, and cinematography. The downside is the rather hackneyed script - difficult to believe that an active criminal donates 50,000 smackers to the sweet immigrant family, and that the US Government would deport someone who had served the US honorably as a GI, even if he has fallen into the web of crime.

In the end, GAMBLING HOUSE is certainly not a waste of time - and if you like Victor Mature, you might even find it a treat!

Victor Mature is the protagonist here, an Italian-born American gangster with a long record of offenses, with several commitments to jail and so on but also with a good war record, getting involved with William Bendix as the chief gangster here in cases of murder. Standing trial he is shown not to be an American citizen, his father somehow neglected to get his family papers In order, so he is sentenced to be deported back to Italy, a country he has never seen, but the judge gives him a chance of proving himself to be a worthy American. There are a lot of interesting insights here into the immigration work, where Terry Moore appears as a leading benefactress guiding immigrants into the country, and the best scenes are with these stranded, humiliated exiles who have lost their country. It's a fascinating combination of social drama, noir, crime and documentary with Victor Mature excellent in his role, learning one final hard lesson.

Victor Mature was a tough and solid leading man hero in many films, but in Gambling House he lets William Bendix make a chump out of him. In fact he gets into a real jackpot with the Immigration authorities.

This story hit home with me because I knew someone who was in just such a bind as Mature was in this film. He was born in Canada of Puerto Rican parents and he was undocumented until he was an adult. For him it was cumbersome process to get citizenship and he was ill equipped to deal with it. But that's another story.

The story of Charles 'Lucky' Luciano was in everyone's mind back then so the story here resonated with the American audiences. Luciano got himself deported to Italy as did a few other foreign born gangsters back then. This was no idle threat.

Mature takes a murder rap for Bendix and pleads self defense and Bendix agrees to a $50,000.00 payment and Mature takes his IOU. Just like Alan Ladd who gets burned with hot money after a contract in This Gun For Hire, Mature gets ratted out to immigration.

When Mature by dint of circumstances is forced to make contact with various hopeful immigrants the film takes an abrupt turn into social drama from noir. Helping him find a social conscience is rich do-gooder socialite Terry Moore.

The end is taken from one of Mature's much better films, Kiss Of Death without the dramatic impact it had in that one. William Bendix was never bad in any film, but he's sadly wasted in one of RKO's lesser noir films.