A Dangerous Profession (RKO, 1949)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 28) I watched a potentially interesting but ultimately not very good film on Turner Classic Movies called A Dangerous Profession, made in 1949 at RKO as a follow-up to Raft’s previous movies there, Johnny Angel (1945), Nocturne (1946) and Race Street (1948). TCM had originally scheduled A Dangerous Profession for the first night of their Raft tribute, January 7, but for some reason instead of A Dangerous Profession they showed a movie from 1929, Side Street (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2025/01/side-street-rko-1929.html), which co-starred Tom, Owen and Matt Moore as on-screen brothers, as they were in real life. My husband Charles walked in on Side Street as he got home from work and got to see Raft’s one scene as a dancer in a floor show that we both agreed was easily the most entertaining part of Side Street. Because it cast Raft and Pat O’Brien as business partners in a bail-bond company, I was hoping A Dangerous Profession would be either a remake or reworking of Rowland Brown’s great 1933 film Blood Money (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/06/blood-money-20th-century-pictures.html), but it wasn’t. Instead it was an all too lame tale about a couple of bail bondsmen who are uncertainly united in one firm, Joe Farley (Pat O’Brien, with whom Raft apparently had a reunion-of-old-friends relationship with while filming) and Vince Kane (George Raft, top-billed). It was directed by Ted Tetzlaff – a major cinematographer who’d worked with Raft before in 1935 on Rumba (the second and last film in Paramount’s short-lived attempt to turn Raft and Carole Lombard into their Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) and had switched to directing after shooting Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Tetzlaff had just finished another RKO thriller with Raft, Johnny Allegro, and before that he’d made his masterpiece as a director: The Window, a reworking of Aesop’s fable “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” in which child actor Bobby Driscoll played a boy who can’t convince his parents that he actually saw their neighbors murder a man in their apartment.

The script for A Dangerous Profession was by Martin Rackin and Warren Duff (Rackin had also written Johnny Allegro) and was apparently originally intended first for Humphrey Bogart and then for Fred MacMurray before it finally ended up in Raft’s hands. (Given that two films Raft had turned down, High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, were both huge career-boosting successes for Bogart, it’s tempting to imagine him playing the lead in just about every film Raft made after 1941.) A Dangerous Profession centers around Vince Kane’s former lover Lucy Brackett (a marvelously understated performance by Ella Raines), who comes to Farley and Kane when her husband Claude Brackett (Bill Williams, who along with his wife Barbara Hale co-starred in another 1949 RKO thriller, The Clay Pigeon – evidently RKO was hoping to turn them into another Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, but they didn’t have the on-screen chemistry for that to work) was arrested and held for $25,000 bail on a minor charge. Police Lieutenant Nick Ferrone (Jim Backus, who also narrates the film) explains that he’s been after Claude Brackett for years because, even though the charge they’ve arrested him on is relatively small, they’re convinced he is a major figure in a criminal organization and if they can keep him in jail, sooner or later he’ll rat out the gang and turn state’s evidence. But Vince Kane is equally determined to bail him out, and when Lucy can only raise $1,600 of Claude’s bail, Vince agrees to provide the other $9,000 out of his company’s funds. Ferrone is not happy that Vince, an old friend of his from the LAPD (where Vince used to be a detective until he quit to enter the bail-bonds business because it paid better), got Brackett released from jail. Farley is also unhappy because he’s concerned that if Brackett “skips,” the firm is out $9,000 it can ill afford to lose. Midway through the movie Brackett is murdered by Roy Collins, a.k.a. Matt Gibney (Robert Gist), a professional hit man working for crime boss Matt McKay (Roland Winters, an odd credit for him given that he was best known as Monogram’s last Charlie Chan).

Vince breaks the news to Lucy, who identifies Brackett’s body, and for a while I was expecting a twist reversal ending in which Brackett had merely faked his death, and Lucy had been part of his plot and fulfilled her end by falsely identifying the corpse in the morgue as her husband’s. But no-o-o-o-o, Brackett is really most sincerely dead, and instead the film climaxes on a deserted road in which Kane has arranged to meet McKay and Collins a.k.a. Gibney. Kane has demanded a $50,000 bribe from McKay to forget the whole thing, and in addition he’s asked Farley for $25,000 to buy him out of the bail business. Only it’s all a trap; in reality he’s invited Lt. Ferrone to the meeting so Ferrone and his fellow cops can bust McKay and Collins for bribery and make the charges stick. The film ends with McKay in custody, Lt. Ferrone shooting and killing Collins to save Kane’s life, and Kane and Lucy (who’s there because she insisted on riding with Lt. Ferrone and two other cops to the rendezvous) in a clinch. Lt. Ferrone offers Kane help in getting back his old job as a police detective, but Kane turns it down and is content with Farley’s offer to raise his share of the bail business from 20 to 30 percent. A Dangerous Profession is a potentially good movie that ends up just being mediocre. Raft’s monotone line deliveries aren’t exactly the stuff of which screen legends are made (memo to Raft: there’s a reason why Bogart became a bigger star than you off two films you turned down!). The Rackin-Duff script totally avoids the class consciousness that made Rowland Brown’s script for Blood Money (which he both wrote and directed) so interesting, particularly the parasitic relationships between bail bondsmen and rich parents who rely on the bondsmen to bail (both literally and figuratively) out their scapegrace children who break the law purely for fun. While the previous Raft RKO films had made money, A Dangerous Profession lost the company $280,000. It also came at a particularly rocky time in the studio’s history, as Howard Hughes had just bought it two years before and was running it in the same ham-handed, egomaniacal way Elon Musk runs X nè Twitter. A Dangerous Profession seems to have escaped the horrible re-editing Hughes imposed on several RKO films, but it isn’t very good, either. New York Times critic A. H. Weiler ended his review by saying that the film “proves that the bail-bond business can be dangerous and that it also can be the basis for an exceedingly ordinary adventure.”