Il terrore di Chicago

The Big Shot is a decent crime picture, reminiscent in theme to the previous year's High Sierra, which also featured Humphrey Bogart. Director Lewis Seiler was no Raoul Walsh but handles the familiar plot about the doomed criminal nicely, giving it shadings of atmosphere, urban and rural. The movie is one of the last flowerings of the second major wave of gangster pictures, of which it is a late example. Bogart is excellent, yet one can sense the genre running out of steam despite his performance and the nice pace of the film. There were more pressing issues at hand by the time the movie was made, such as a world war with Germany and Japan, as overall the activity of the criminals in the movie seem small potatoes compared to what was going on elsewhere, in Europe and in the Pacific.

You can't be mistaken by a Warner Brothers yarn from the forties or thirties, especially a gangster, crime flick. This one has no Jimmy Cagney nor Edward G Robinson as the lead, but Humphrey Bogart. He was then rising to the stardom, to the top, but he had not reached it yet...The director is Lewis Seiler, whith whom Bogie already made CRIME SCHOOL and KING OF THE UNDERWORLD. Seiler was a solid director, maybe unfairly negmected, forgotten, who gave us good war movies. However he was not Raoul Walsh nor Michael Curtiz. Bogart is here impressive, nearly terrific in a gangster role, a rough, tough hoodlum for whom the audiences can feel the greatest empathy.

"The Big Shot" is a 1942 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Irene Manning. Bogie is a career criminal, Joseph Berne, who is sent to prison for life for something he didn't do - set up by his own attorney (Stanley Ridges), who finds out that Joe is involved with his wife (Manning). Berne's fake alibi is provided by a young salesman, George Anderson, who needed money and instead gets a year for perjury. It's George's predicament later on that gives Joe a crisis of conscience.

After years of toil at Warner Brothers, Bogart is now a star, and his image as a gangster is softening and would morph with Casablanca into an anti-hero. He does a good job in this film - his story is told in flashback from the prison hospital. The script is problematic. One glaring offense is that the police locate a criminal in a cabin. When they get there, they don't surround it, and their prey, not even aware the police are there, go out the back and drive away. Most viewers are aware that the cops surround an edifice. Not here. The movie is not particularly well directed by Lewis Seiler. There is, however, an exciting car chase.

Of interest here is George's girlfriend, the beautiful and doomed Susan Peters, who less than three years later would be paralyzed in a hunting accident. She was signed by MGM after this film. 1942 was a banner year for her, as she was nominated for a supporting Best Actress Oscar for "Random Harvest." She died in 1952. One of Hollywood's saddest stories.

In this crime drama from Warner Brothers and director Lewis Seiler, career criminal Duke Berne (Humphrey Bogart) is a paroled three-time loser, destined for a life sentence if he gets busted again. He tries to stay clean, but old compatriots coax him into helping out on an armored car robbery. Things go south, and he ends up behind bars, with nothing but escape offering any hope.

This is average material elevated a bit by Bogart's presence. The armored car robbery sequence is excitingly shot, as is the prison escape attempt, and a snowy car chase. The supporting cast is a bit weak, though Irene Manning and Susan Peters are both lovely to look at. This was a bittersweet film for me, as it was the last major Bogart film that I had not seen. Only A Devil with Women (1930) and Body and Soul (1931) remain unseen. I know it's a bit cliche, but Bogart is my favorite actor of the classic film era, so knowing that there are no more major films out there that I have not seen is a little bit sad. On a side note, I notice that this hadn't been shown on TCM until this year, after a 13 year absence from the channel, which is strange since it's a Bogart picture and a Warner Brothers release, with it only having been shown five total times since 1994. This could be due to the blackface performance that happens during the prison show sequence.

This lost little bit of film noir featuring Bogart in his usual tough guy role (this film being made just previous to Casablanca) is not a bad watch for a lazy afternoon. There is nothing stellar about the plot, the performances, or the action, and some of it is even quite funny. Watch as the camera is pushed in at the actors' faces at key moments time and time again. Another fun part is the snowy car/motorcycle chase, a danger anyone who has fish-tailed their car on the way to work on a cold winter morning can relate to. If you haven't seen "Casablanca" or the "The Maltese Falcon," make sure you've seen those first, but you could certainly do worse than "The Big Shot."