Mon 7 Oct 2019
RACE STREET . RKO Radio Pictures, 1948. George Raft, William Bendix, Marilyn Maxwell, Frank Faylen, Harry Morgan, Gale Robbins. Director: Edwin L. Marin.
Although available on DVD from Warner Archives, Race Street is largely a rather obscure one. even if considered film noir, a popular category now, if ever there was one. It has a decent cast, but I think the reason hardly anyone remembers or talks about it today, is that as a film, it’s mostly a mediocre one. It has its moments, including a few flashes of hard-boiled action, but it’s far too talky to stand out in a field filled with so many other crime films that came out around the same time and had a lot more to offer.
George Raft plays the kind of bookie whom other bookies lay off their larger bets on, but a new gang is in town (San Francisco), and they’re beginning to push their way in,. What they offer is “protection” and they show no remorse in demonstrating what happens to guys who don’t take them up on it. William Bendix plays a childhood friend who’s also a cop, and who tries to persuade Raft to let the police take care of the problem.
Raft will have nothing to do with it, of course, not even when one of his friends dies after being pushed around a little too hard. It doesn’t stop Bendix from talking and nudging and trying to persuade him otherwise. A couple of lengthy musical numbers featuring Gale Robbins as the lead vocalist are well done, but move the story along, they don’t.
Marilyn Maxwell as a sultry brunette this time around plays Raft’s girl friend, a very eye-pleasing girl friend, to be sure, but her role in the story is, well, shall we say not particularly well filled out. If I’d been in charge of production, say, I’d have cut the musical numbers and given her story line the amount of running time it really needed.
Since it’s far too late for the real director to have taken my advice, alas, he didn’t. While the end result is watchable, especially if you’re a George Raft fan — and to tell you the truth, I think his performance here is one of his better ones — you probably won’t remember it for more than ten minutes or so afterward.
October 7th, 2019 at 5:48 pm
Okay minor noirish if not particularly noir film with a better cast than story, and some decent, if uninspired, tough guy stuff.
October 7th, 2019 at 7:58 pm
I like the cast, and the directorial tone, but the story isn’t quite there, but easy to do worse. So, David has it right.
October 7th, 2019 at 8:09 pm
David summed it up in two lines better than I did in five paragraphs.
December 8th, 2019 at 11:37 am
Any film that has Bendix slugging it out with Faylen is worth watching. There was a lot of static directing in the first act, two or three people delivering expository dialogue with no movement at all. It was as flat as Raft’s acting. I thought it was because the B budget was too tight. Things picked up though in the second act and it looked like Marin saved the dollars for a couple of money shots, like the above mentioned musical bit (which by the way was a great sequence but a terrible song) and a really good bit of rough-house at the end. As for Maxwell, her character was woefully under-developed, given its true nature. Why she was not there at the final fight/shoot-out is beyond me. It is a missed opportunity to elevate the film a notch or two.