Following the signs of promise in Desperate, Anthony Mann’s next picture confirmed he was moving in the right direction and added at least one more positive note. Now at PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), another Poverty Row studio, Mann was still faced with limited resources but there two unexpected bonuses. Firstly, he found himself working with the writer John C. Higgins, an experienced writer of crime stories who went on to write scripts for five films in total for Mann. The second bonus was a more complex affair. PRC had actually been bought and merged into a company controlled by the railway magnate Robert R. Young and he had entered into an agreement with J. Arthur Rank’s UK studio which was seeking better distribution of its films in North America. When Railroaded! was finally released it would be under the banner of the new company Eagle-Lion. This new company would, during its brief life as a producer-distributor, elevate Anthony Mann to a position from which he would eventually make A pictures for the majors. The copyright on the print I watched belonged to ‘Pathé Industries’, the company Young bought as the last remaining part of the French company Pathé’s US operation after most of it had been merged into RKO in the early 1930s.
Higgins began work on a story written by Gertrude Walker, but he also drew on the details of a real case of the wrongful arrest of two men, Joseph Majczek and Theodore Marcinkiewicz in early 1930s Chicago. Their convictions for murder were overturned in 1945 for Majczek but not until 1950 for Marcinkiewicz. There were suggestions about incompetence in the prosecution and possible police corruption during Prohibition in Chicago. 20th Century Fox was working on a script connected to these events at around this time. This was Call Northside 777 (1948), directed by Henry Hathaway and starring James Stewart. Fox was so concerned that Railroaded! might eat into the potential audience numbers for their film that they were prepared to pay Eagle-Lion a significant sum to curtail Railroaded!‘s time in cinemas. Eagle-Lion had also to re-shoot some scenes. By this time Mann had already finished shooting his next picture T-Men. If he was disappointed that Railroaded! wasn’t the success it might have been, he was soon going to enjoy his biggest hit so far.
But Railroaded! still has plenty going for it and it’s a worthwhile watch. The title refers to the swift action of the police in arresting someone and pushing hard for a conviction. In this case, a night-time hold-up of a beauty salon goes wrong and a police officer checking buildings is shot and killed. The two robbers have arranged to use a laundry truck for their getaway and in doing so know they can frame the truck driver. The leading robber Duke Martin is played by John Ireland, a charismatic actor who heads the cast. (The poster above presents a potential romance narrative but it’s really the wrongful arrest and subsequent quest to find the real killer.) The operator of the salon business is Duke’s girlfriend Clara (Jane Randolph) who is part of an illegal numbers racket using the salon as a front. She is in effect helping her boyfriend to rob his boss Ainsworth at the Bombay nightclub. The plotting is quite complex so I won’t spoil it. The main driver of the narrative is the trucker’s older sister (Sheila Ryan) who tries to convince the more reasonable of the two investigating detectives of her brother’s innocence. In true noir fashion the climax will involve the sister and the detective sergeant (Hugh Beaumont), the lead criminal and his girlfriend and Ainsworth, the club owner. The only odd twist is that Rosie and the Sergeant appear to know each other from childhood in the ‘neighbourhood’, but it’s a rather cosy suburban neighbourhood with flowers in the gardens. More in keeping with noir is that Steve Ryan is an ex-soldier from the Pacific War.
The film was photographed by Guy Roe who, like George Diskant on Desperate, had spent a long time as a camera assistant, in this case at Paramount. He would have been there at roughly the same time as Anthony Mann and both men worked on films directed by Preston Sturges but not both on the same one. I don’t know if they met then, but I imagine the two would understand each other. In any case they managed to shoot the film in ten days, using some stock footage to suggest a New York uptown street. Jeanine Basinger in her book on Anthony Mann (first published in 1979 and updated in 2007) suggests that Railroaded! is a more ‘unified’ and coherent narrative than Desperate. She acknowledges the weakness of the actors, apart from John Ireland, who becomes a contradiction as the villain but also the character we perhaps most identify with. Sheila Ryan seems to have been known as ‘the poor man’s Ann Sheridan’. She was a prolific B movie actor and a war-time pin-up. Here she does manage to be suitably angry and determined to clear her brother.
It is a cheap film and a short film (72 minutes) but it has a consistent visual style and the opening and closing scenes are two classic examples of film noir action scenes – the night-time robbery and a shootout in a nightclub with the lights switched off. At first I wasn’t sure I agreed with Basinger and felt I was more taken with Desperate. On reflection though, I can see that Higgins has created quite a neat plot and the twist – that Rosie should meet Duke – does work to set up the finale. However the very last brief scene seems ‘tagged on’ to appease the PCA chief Joseph Breen who was determined to make sure that local police chiefs who controlled the licensing of local cinemas didn’t ban films attacking the police.
The film is widely available online but I wouldn’t recommend the DVD I bought in the UK which is poor quality (you can see that from some of the screengrabs above)..
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