L'engrenage fatal

Anthony Mann directed some of the very best noirs of the 1940s and early 1950s.

This one is brutal, hard-hitting, and unrelenting till its Hollywood ended. (The ending may have been tacked on. I don't know. But it works organically with the whole, unlike many others.)

The problem for me with some of his movies, this one included, is that they are so dark they're almost impossible to see at times. Yes, it's atmospheric. But it's also frustrating.

The literal noir in some -- not all -- of his movies reminds me of the staging of Wagner at the Metropolitan Opera. Yes, it's brooding and intense. But it's also really hard to see.

A faked robbery goes awry and a cop is killed, causing the perpetrators to frame an innocent kid to take the rap. What they don't foresee is the kid's stubborn sister.

John Ireland makes one nasty bad guy, and when he lovingly polishes that gunbarrel with perfumed bullets, we get the idea. Yes indeed, he's more than just a bad guy. The movie's a crime drama done in noirish style by the expert Anthony Mann. There's little of the hallmark ambiguity of classic noir in the characters. Nonetheless, there's the innocent kid Steve (Kelly) who looks to be the victim of a malevolent noirish fate. Of course, there has to be a cheap dame in the crime mix, and Jane Randolph flops around effectively as Duke's (Ireland) brassy blonde punching bag.

Note how the movie starts out in slam-bang fashion, and how effectively Mann uses close- ups, especially of the suddenly terrified Marie (Converse), to turn screen violence into a sense of real violence. This, I think, was a Mann specialty and one reason he's treasured by fans of noir. Then too, that shootout in the shadowy nightclub amounts to a clever touch of visual imagination. No, the story itself is not exactly novel, while Beaumont makes the kind of cop you'd expect from Beaver Cleaver's dad. Still, the movie's done with style and conviction, with an outstanding turn from Ireland, and rightfully belongs in the canon of 40's noir.

Set Up! or Framed! might be better titles than Railroaded! While it's true that the police pursue their suspect (Ed Kelly) with undue alacrity, it's also true that they're only following a trail of maliciously planted evidence. And an odd feature of the movie is that Kelly remains almost an incidental character (not even appearing in the credits); the focus stays on the police and the real behind-the-scenes villain.

Brash blonde Jane Randolph operates a little beauty salon that's really a front for a back-room book. One night a couple of masked robbers knock it over, but things go wrong: A beat cop is killed, and one of the gunmen (Keefe Brasselle) takes a bullet. Soon detective Hugh Beaumont knocks on Kelly's door, led there by the boy's monogrammed navy scarf, a sighting of his van at the scene, and a description provided by Randolph. Even Brasselle, bandaged up like the Invisible Man, names Kelly in deathbed testimony.

The only one who believes his innocence is his sister (Sheila Ryan). Luckily, Beaumont knows her from the old neighborhood and still is a bit sweet on her. Unluckily, so is the man who set up her brother (John Ireland) as part of a coverup to swindle the head of the syndicate both he and Randolph work for. Little by little, the craftily stitched-together ruse starts to pull apart at the seams, and the hotheaded Ireland grows more reckless and violent...

Directed by Anthony Mann just before his collaboration with cinematographer John Alton took his work to a new plateau, Railroaded! displays some of his trademark tricks (a taut story line; swift and unexpected burst of violence; shadows used not merely as mood but visual metaphors).

And Ireland gets not only top billing but one of his best roles. When he's not slapping around Randolph for her sloppy drinking (in the grand tradition of alcoholic molls like Claire Trevor in Key Largo and Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat), he's fetishistically perfuming his bullets. He's quite the sex-equals-violence kind of guy; when Randolph and Ryan get into a hair-pulling tussle, he watches from an alcove with a nasty smirk on his face, and his gun barrel unconsciously traces the action. It's as if it's deciding who will be the lucky recipient of its payload.

After watching RAILROADED, I'm convinced JOHN IRELAND could have taken his place alongside men like ROBERT MITCHUM doing grim little film noirs during the '40s. He's excellent as a tight-lipped gangster with a scowling expression as he methodically kills anyone double-crossing him or standing in his way. He knocks around his blonde girlfriend (JANE RANDOLPH) with woman-hating contempt and fires bullets with casual lack of concern for fatalities. In short, he makes an ideal film noir anti-hero.

HUGH BEAUMONT, known by most fans principally as Beaver's dad on TV, is only lukewarm as the detective who falls for SHIELAH RYAN and decides to help her track down the killer after Ireland frames her kid brother (ED KELLY) for the murder of a policeman. Their final fade-out kiss looks a little clumsy but--hey, the accent is on crime and action, not romance.

Anthony Mann does the best he can with a low-budget crime melodrama and turns it into a taut, well-made, shadowy film noir with Ireland showing his stuff as a ruthless gangster.

Summing up: Brisk and entertaining, it's well worth watching for fans of this genre.

This film has it all, great photography, well developed plot AND story, snappy dialogue and passable acting. I suppose I shouldn't say it has it "all" in that case, as the characters are not particularly round and because of that the acting is not always completely satisfying to me. But that doesn't prevent me from popping this movie in again and again, just because it's non-stop action and so so pretty to look at.

"Leave it Beaver" fans should see this, of course, but might be slightly disappointed that Beaumont is a bit more rigid than the sit-com serial allowed him to be - I wished for more warmth from his character, as I know he was capable of conveying. John Ireland, however, was brilliantly evil and his acting, at least, was top notch.