Riffraff (RKO, 1947)

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

Last night (Saturday, May 3) my husband Charles and I watched the Eddie Muller “Noir Alley” showing on Turner Classic Movies of an intriguing 1947 RKO thriller called Riffraff, starring Pat O’Brien (in a pretty wild departure from his usual good-guy casting in his earlier years at Warner Bros.) as Dan Hammer, an unscrupulous private detective working out of an office called Zenith in Panama City. Just how Dan Hammer got to Panama or how he built up his reputation as a “fixer” with a network of connections he can use to get various people out of trouble with the law is not made clear in the script by writer and future producer Martin Rackin, but the MacGuffin is a map of 25 mapped out but not yet registered sites for oil drilling in Peru. In fact, the film starts with a 6 ½-minute wordless sequence effectively staged by director Ted Tetzlaff, who had just transitioned after 20 years as a cinematographer after the huge success of Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, also produced at RKO. Though Tetzlaff had had two previous co-directorial credits, both from 1941 (World Premiere, John Barrymore’s last film, with Otis Garrett, and Glamour Boy with Ralph Murphy, a weird rehash of Jackie Cooper’s 1931 star-making hit Skippy with Cooper cast as a former child star trying to produce a remake of Skippy with a temperamental Darryl Hickman in the lead), Riffraff marked Tetzlaff’s permanent career change from cinematographer to director. His chops in the latter role were firmly established by that long dialogue-less opening sequence set in Peru, in which two men board a freight plane carrying them from Peru to Panama but only one arrives. The pilot and co-pilot get an alarm on their dashboard to indicate that the back door has opened in the middle of their flight. If it were a modern-day Boeing airplane the door could well have opened accidentally on its own, but in 1947 they immediately realize that it was opened on purpose by one of their passengers.

The survivor is Charles Hasso (played by a Viennese actor named Mark Krah who had worked with Michael Curtiz before his emigration to the U.S. in 1926 to shoot Noah’s Ark for Warner Bros.), and he insists that his fellow passenger just opened the door and jumped for no reason. Of course we immediately assume that Hasso deliberately murdered him by overpowering him and pushing him out of the plane. When Hasso lands, he immediately hooks up with Dan Hammer – whose name is an intriguing coincidence since 1947 was also the year Mickey Spillane published I, the Jury, his first novel featuring an even more amoral private detective named Mike Hammer – and pays Hammer $100 to keep him alive until the next day. Of course, Hammer doesn’t succeed; when he goes to visit Hasso that night he finds Hasso murdered by an unknown assailant who caught him in the shower and both strangled him and left him to drown in the bathtub. Then Hammer is hired by Walter F. Gredson (Jerome Cowan, the first-rate character actor who was unlucky enough to be killed off in the first reel of his best-known film, 1941’s The Maltese Falcon), an oil-company executive. Gredson is willing to pay $5,000 to recover the map Hasso’s victim had on him when he was killed, which indicates where the discovered but unregistered oil deposits in Peru are. Midway through the movie it becomes apparent that Gredson is a renegade who has no intention of sharing the oil discoveries with his employers. Instead he plans to register them himself and take all the money from the oilfields for himself and his girlfriend, Maxine Manning (Anne Jeffreys). Hammer’s office is broken into by the piece’s villain, Eric Molinar (Walter Slezak, son of turn-of-the-last-century operatic Heldentenor Leo Slezak), who plays a sort of combination of Sydney Greenstreet’s and Peter Lorre’s characters from The Maltese Falcon.

Molinar shows up at Hammer’s office with two thugs (Norbert Schiller and the athletic Sammy Stine) to beat up Hammer and force him to reveal the whereabouts of the mystery oil map – which he insists he doesn’t know even though the map is tacked to a bulletin board in his office and therefore, like the purloined letter in Edgar Allan Poe’s pioneering mystery story, it’s effectively hidden in plain sight. Ultimately Molinar grabs the map from Hammer’s wall and tries to escape with it, but the police hunt him down and Hammer gets back the map, though it’s not clear what he intends to do with it. He does pair up with Maxine at the end after Maxine had been assigned by the now-dead Gredson (killed with a knife hurled by one of Molinar’s thugs) to romance him to see if she could extract from him the whereabouts of the all-important oil map. Riffraff, which I’d got on a pre-recorded VHS tape in the 1980’s but hadn’t watched or thought of since then, is a quite entertaining and reliable thriller despite some whopping plot holes. It suffers from the miscasting of Pat O’Brien, who’s just too much the good guy to be credible as an unscrupulous private eye (and it’s tempting to think what Dick Powell, Robert Ryan or Robert Mitchum, RKO’s usual go-to guys for noir roles in the 1940’s, could have made of it), but it was apparently O’Brien himself who brought Rackin’s script to RKO’s attention and insisted on starring in it as part of the deal. Though it’s not that much of a film noir thematically, it is visually, with cinematographer George E. Diskant obviously having learned a great deal from Tetzlaff on how to shoot a story like this and giving us some quite striking compositions, many of them involving sinister climbs up stairs (a favorite of Tetzlaff’s former employer, Alfred Hitchcock). Though when I first got this film on VHS I remember being disappointed because for some reason I’d assumed that George Raft was the star (it was made during his series of avuncular good-guy roles in RKO noirs like Johnny Angel, Nocturne and Race Street, the last of which is a murder mystery set in San Francisco that is arguably the closest clue we have to what a film of The Maltese Falcon would have been like with Raft, who actually was offered the role and turned it down, as Sam Spade), it strikes me now as a quite good if not quite classic thriller, exciting to watch despite the plot holes, and an unexpectedly appropriate showcase for Pat O’Brien.