Loan Shark (Encore Pictures, Lippert Films, 1952)

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

Later on March 29, my husband Charles and I watched a surprisingly good movie on YouTube: Loan Shark, a 1952 “B” from Encore Pictures (as soon as I saw that credit I inevitably joked to Charles, “Haven’t we seen this before?”) released through Lippert and dealing with a loan-shark racket that victimizes the employees of the Delta Tire Company. (I was tempted to joke that Delta would be better off if they made their tires round rather than triangle-shaped, but there was enough “tire porn” in the movie it was clear that Delta tires, like everybody else’s, were round.) Directed by Seymour Friedman from a story by future producer Martin Rackin and a script by Rackin and Eugene Ling, Loan Shark stars George Raft as Joe Gargen, who’s just been released from prison after serving a nearly three-year prison sentence for assault. (He hit somebody in a bar fight and knocked him down, but though he only used his fists, since he’d once been a professional boxer his fists legally counted as “weapons.”) He shows up at the unnamed town where Delta has its headquarters to stay with his sister, Martha Haines (Helen Westcott). Only the workers at Delta are being victimized by a particularly nasty ring of crooks who first run an illegal casino where the Delta employees gamble away their money, then offer to loan them at typically outrageous rates of interest so high that the poor victims are continually paying interest and never get a chance to pay off the principal. What’s more, the gang has a bunch of thugs on retainer to beat up anyone who falls behind on their payments. Martha’s best friend, Ann Nelson (Dorothy Hart), is the secretary of the plant supervisor, Mr. Howell (George Eldredge), who’s trying to work with the union leader to break the loan-shark gang once and for all.

She offers to get Joe Gargen a job at Delta Tire, but Joe at first refuses when he finds that what the job really is is to infiltrate the loan-shark gang and thereby get the information they need to report them to the police. Then Martha’s husband Ed (William Phipps) is murdered by Charlie Thompson (Russell Johnson), who’s ostensibly just another Delta worker but is secretly part of the gang. His real job is to steer fellow Delta workers to the illegal casino and hook them up with the loan sharks. Charlie knocked off Ed because Ed was threatening to organize the Delta workers to fight back against the gang and resist them. Joe takes the job of busting the gang but insists on doing it his way with no interference either from Delta’s management or the union and no involvement of the police. Joe ultimately gets invited to join the gang by Vince Phillips (John Hoyt), its above-ground leader, but enforcer Lou Donelli (Paul Stewart, the butler from Citizen Kane) is suspicious of him. Joe rises quickly in the gang, especially after he opens a legitimate-seeming laundry, Embassy, as a front to reach out to bored housewives and ensnare them as casino and loan-shark customers. Of course Martha and Ann are thoroughly disgusted with Joe’s gang involvements, especially since Joe can’t explain to them why he’s doing it. In that regard Loan Shark resembles a 1930’s Warner Bros. gangster movie, including ones George Raft had previously made, in which the good guy has to pretend to be a crook to infiltrate a criminal organization but can’t tell those near and dear to him why he’s doing it. Joe is determined to remain in the gang long enough to suss out the mysterious “Mr. Big” who’s really in charge of it and making all the money, and to accomplish this he starts keeping his own set of books about Embassy Laundry detailing how much money they’re actually taking in, so even if they escape justice for the loan-sharking he can still report them to the Internal Revenue Service and get them busted as tax cheats. Alas, Joe “outs” himself by calling Howell from the Embassy office, unaware that Donelli has flipped on the office intercom so he can eavesdrop on Joe’s end of the call.

Joe gets waylaid outside the office by Phillips and Donelli, though he refuses to get in the same car as them and insists on taking a taxi to the secret headquarters of the real head of the organization, In a 1930’s movie, made during a far more anti-capitalist age, Delta CEO Mr. Howell would have turned out to be the “Big Boss,” but as of 1952 it is Walter Kerr (Larry Dobkin), whom we’d previously seen only as the gang’s seemingly milquetoast accountant. Ultimately there’s a big shoot-out in Walter’s home in which both he and Donelli are killed, and after they learn the real reason Joe had apparently sold out to the gang, Martha and Ann reconcile with him and there’s the expected clinch between Joe and Ann at the end. There’s also a rather odd credit for a song called “Peru,” composed by Victor Young with lyrics by Edward Heyman and with a melody strikingly reminiscent of the 1930’s song “September in the Rain,” but though it’s heard as an instrumental through much of the movie (including a relatively complete performance by a vaguely Latin band in a bar called, like the one in The Leech Woman, simply “Bar”), no one actually sings it – not even Margia Dean as “Ivy,” a waitress and (it’s hinted) B-girl at “Bar” and the illegal casino for which it’s a cover. Loan Shark is a pretty predictable movie – though that in itself was a relief after the hairpin turn Wife Stalker took in its last five minutes – but also a surprisingly well-made one, even though it would have been better if Raft had made it 15 years earlier and hadn’t been so obviously over the hill as he was here (he was 51 when he made Loan Shark and both he and Paul Stewart were obviously being stunt-doubled in their fight scenes). Incidentally, Charles and I both looked up Raft’s career on imdb.com after Loan Shark, and it turned out his real name was George Ranft (just one letter longer than his screen moniker), he lived until 1980, and his last film, made that year, was called The Man With Bogart’s Face. Given the bizarre connections between Raft’s and Bogart’s careers – Bogart got major boosts from making High Sierra (1940) and The Maltese Falcon (1941) after Raft turned them down, and Raft actively lobbied for the male lead in Casablanca (1942) only to be told by Jack Warner, “Forget it. After High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, Bogart’s a bigger star than you are now” – Raft must have felt haunted by Bogart’s memory even though Raft survived him by 23 years!