by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2011 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The night before last Charles and I had watched a far less
exalted movie: A Bullet for Joey, a 1955
independent thriller made by producers Sam Bischoff and David Diamond for
United Artists release with the over-the-hill gang: the stars are Edward G.
Robinson and George Raft, and the female lead is played by Audrey Totter, a
talented and powerful actress who never quite got on the “A” list — though
comparing her performance here to her work in a similar role in the 1947 film
of Raymond Chandler’s The Lady in the Lake makes clear that she was just as striking a screen personality and had
got considerably better as an actress in the intervening eight years. The film
is a good one but one which could have been considerably better: the plot deals
with Raoul Leduc (Robinson), a lieutenant in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
who heads an investigation into the bludgeoning to death of one of his
officers. The officer was killed by an organ grinder — actually a spy disguised as an organ grinder — who was keeping watch on a
nuclear physics professor at McGill University, Dr. Carl Macklin (George
Dolenz) and who had concealed a movie camera in his barrel organ to photograph
Macklin’s morning routine so the head of his spy ring, Eric Hartman (Peter Van
Eyck), could make arrangements to kidnap him. To head the kidnapping ring he
hires Joe Victor (Raft), a criminal who insists that his whole gang be brought
in as part of the deal — including his former girlfriend Joyce Geary (Audrey
Totter), who’s running some sort of legitimate business in Cuba and really
doesn’t want to rejoin Joe on the dark side, only one of Joe’s other men
blackmails her into it.
The film was directed by Lewis Allen from a script by
“Geoffrey Homes,” a.k.a. Daniel Mainwaring, and A. I. Bezzerides (two much
better writers than one would gather from this movie) based on a story by James
Benson Nablo, and the main reason it isn’t a better film than it is is Allen’s
paceless direction; scene after scene that needs relentless pacing to make its
effect ambles along at a lackadaisical pace that gives the audience all too
much time to ponder the plot holes. The biggest one is one Charles spotted:
why, when the seemingly all-important professor — obviously the writers were thinking the Soviet Union wanted to
kidnap the professor so he would work on their nuclear arsenal instead of America’s — has utterly no
security detail around him at all, the bad guys go through all this elaborate
planning instead of just grabbing him. Maybe the idea was that they were
setting the Audrey Totter character to seduce him and ultimately either get him
so far in sexual thrall or make him spend so much money on her as to get him so
far in debt that he’d agree, more or less willingly, to change sides in the
Cold War and go to work for the Soviets voluntarily — but nothing in the script even hints at that. Instead the writing committee pulls one of
the stupidest clichés in the book and has Totter’s character fall genuinely in
love with the professor — and they actually go off together after Robinson’s
character and his squad of Mounties figure out the plot and get their men.
A
Bullet for Joey has the air of a penance
project for both Robinson and Mainwaring, who’d been blacklisted for their
Leftist connections and seemed to have taken the chance to work on an open
piece of anti-Soviet Cold War propaganda in hopes that would get them off the
list (though in Robinson’s case the man who got him off the blacklist was Cecil
B. DeMille, who cast him as Dathan in The Ten Commandments a year later). Cold War propaganda films can be good
movies on occasion (the Paramount cheapie The Atomic City with Gene Barry is a tight, exciting thriller and as
long as you view the “atomic bomb secrets” as just another MacGuffin you should
be fine with it) but this isn’t one of them, and it’s less the fault of
Robinson or Raft (who turn in perfectly polished, non-groundbreaking old-pro
performances — it was their second film together, after Manpower in 1941, but the publicity for it made it seem like
their first) than of that damnably sluggish director, who made his first mark
in 1944 with The Uninvited — a
ghost story, and one expects
ghost stories to be slow!
