After the Academy Awards Charles and I had time to watch another movie, and it was Johnny Allegro, an oddball 1949 film noir from Columbia directed by Ted Tetzlaff (who’d risen from cinematographer to director on the strength of his camerawork for Hitchcock’s Notorious) from a script by Karen DeWolf and Guy Endore based on a story by James Edward Grant — best known in Hollywood as John Wayne’s favorite writer: if you signed the Duke for your movie one of his conditions was that you had to put Grant on the payroll to rewrite the script for him. The star was George Raft and the movie was an indication of the downward trajectory Raft had sent his career on with his stupid decisions to turn down the Warner Bros. vehicles High Sierra in 1940 and The Maltese Falcon in 1941. Both those movies went to Humphrey Bogart, who used their unusually complex leading roles to ride out of the ghetto of cookie-cutter gangster parts and into Casablanca and superstardom. By 1949 their positions in the movie industry had reversed: instead of Bogart being the actor you got if you couldn’t get Raft, now Raft was the actor you got if you couldn’t get Bogart — and with that in mind I couldn’t help not only noticing all the elements of Johnny Allegro the writers ripped off of Bogart vehicles (The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca and Key Largo in particular) but wondering how much better it might have been with Bogart in the male lead. The film has a highly convoluted plot: Johnny Allegro (George Raft) owns and runs the flower concession in the lobby of a Los Angeles hotel when he’s accosted by two familiar film noir figures: a morally ambiguous woman named Glenda Chapman (Nina Foch) and a cop named Schultzy (Will Geer, who puts the rest of the cast one degree of separation from The Waltons) who recognizes Johnny Allegro as former Mafia hit man Johnny Rock. “Allegro” was his original family name (and the writers couldn’t resist the obvious joke about it: when he’s cruising Nina Foch’s character and she complains she’s going too fast, he says, “That’s what my name means”) and he got into gangster life when he was called upon to supply the big bouquets common at Mob funerals and he decided he wanted the easy life of a gangster — only he drew a 10-year prison sentence at Sing Sing. But he escaped and, when World War II happened, he went into the Office of Strategic Services (since the Army wouldn’t take him because of his lowlife associations) and did an heroic parachute jump in the Pacific Theatre that saved the lives of an entire detail. Got that? Basically good guy with a criminal past who’s redeemed by being a war hero — just like Casablanca, though the writers of Bogart’s masterpiece were a good deal more subtle about it.
Anyway, Glenda asks Allegro for help escaping the hotel, and in the basement they’re cornered by Schultzy and two other cops; Allegro shoots it out with them and Schultzy dies — only he doesn’t really die: Schultzy is a U.S. Treasury agent on the trail of a ring of crooks passing counterfeit money in Florida (counterfeit actually printed up by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, who intended to flood California with it and thus destabilize the U.S. economy) and the whole shoot-out was a setup, staged with blank cartridges in Allegro’s gun. The idea is to encourage Glenda to recruit Allegro into the gang, which is headed by one of the most interesting film noir villains: Morgan Vallin (George Macready), a man of culture and a hunter quite like General Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game who regards guns as uncouth and messy and shoots his prey with a bow and arrow instead. Allegro flies cross-country with Glenda and ends up on an island off the coast of Florida which contains a large mansion that looks like the one in which Bela Lugosi was trying to transplant Lou Costello’s brain into the Frankenstein Monster in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Vallin lives on this island but every so often goes to the Florida mainland to dump his counterfeit currency at the racetrack (presumably Hialeah, though that’s not specified) and gets a bundle of real green in exchange from a gang member who works for the track. Vallin, who confiscated Allegro’s gun at the beginning of his stay with him, ultimately discovers that Allegro’s gun is loaded with blanks, realizes that Allegro is a law-enforcement undercover agent, and tries to kill him on the island with his trademark longbow but ends up being pushed off a cliff and falling to his death below.
Thanks to a phone conversation between the two picked up on a phone line Allegro had deliberately left open so the Coast Guard and the Treasury agents he was reporting to could hear it, Schultzy says he’s willing to recommend clemency for both of them. The End. Johnny Allegro is an O.K. movie from a time when film noir was a mature enough genre it was already hardening into cliché, and I got the impression that the final two-thirds were set in Florida only because Bogart and Lauren Bacall had just made Key Largo, set in Florida. Its best parts are some almost textbook noir compositions from Tetzlaff and cinematographer Joseph Biroc (doing Tetzlaff’s old job!) and Macready playing a quirky villain role pretty obviously derived from his previous role in the Rita Hayworth vehicle Gilda (one imdb.com contributor noted the similarity in character names — Macready was “Ballin Mundson” in Gilda and “Morgan Vallin” here). Its weaknesses are in the script, which is not only convoluted but depends on our believing that a sophisticated criminal enterprise like Vallin’s (and the two sinisterly-accented people who are his bosses in it and have someone even higher in an unnamed sinister foreign power they report to!) would be so sloppy in their recruitment strategies that they’d let Allegro basically walk in — though Charles gave the film points for having the counterfeit $500 million stored in an entire shack. One of the things that rub him the wrong way about a lot of movies is they assume a large sum of cash is far more compact than it is; showing a movie in which people are walking around with half a million dollars in cash in a small attaché case and he’ll lose the suspension of disbelief instantly.
