Railroaded!

After watching RAILROADED, I'm convinced JOHN IRELAND could have taken his place alongside men like ROBERT MITCHUM doing grim little film noirs during the '40s. He's excellent as a tight-lipped gangster with a scowling expression as he methodically kills anyone double-crossing him or standing in his way. He knocks around his blonde girlfriend (JANE RANDOLPH) with woman-hating contempt and fires bullets with casual lack of concern for fatalities. In short, he makes an ideal film noir anti-hero.

HUGH BEAUMONT, known by most fans principally as Beaver's dad on TV, is only lukewarm as the detective who falls for SHIELAH RYAN and decides to help her track down the killer after Ireland frames her kid brother (ED KELLY) for the murder of a policeman. Their final fade-out kiss looks a little clumsy but--hey, the accent is on crime and action, not romance.

Anthony Mann does the best he can with a low-budget crime melodrama and turns it into a taut, well-made, shadowy film noir with Ireland showing his stuff as a ruthless gangster.

Summing up: Brisk and entertaining, it's well worth watching for fans of this genre.

Once I got into collecting film-noir movies, I had to have this one, so I paid big bucks for the VHS. I say that because it added to my disappointment. The film is okay, but if you have really high expectations before seeing this, you'll probably be let down, as I was. I liked this more on the second viewing when I knew what to expect.

In the beginning, it dwells too long on the innocent man-being arrested theme but after that part is over, it picks up, but then bogs down again. For people who grew up watching "Leave It To Beaver" on TV, this film offers Hugh Beaumont as a main character. Since I did, I always find it interesting to see Beaumont in different roles. I also enjoyed ogling a pretty brunette, "Rosie," played by Sheila Ryan. The climax to this story was good, and it was surprisingly realistic. There was some decent film-noir photography in spots, too. Overall, okay but not what it's cracked up to be.

Railroaded! (1947)

*** (out of 4)

Anthony Mann directed this thriller, which has a Detective (Hugh Beaumont) trying to clear an innocent man of murder charges. The Detective eventually falls for the suspect's sister (Sheila Ryan), which leads to a wannabe gangster (John Ireland) who we know is the real killer. This is a pretty suspenseful and highly entertaining little film that has a whole lot going for it. Mann does a terrific job at keeping the film moving very nicely and he has enough interesting characters for two films. This was my first time seeing Beaumont outside of his role of the father on Leave it to Beaver and I was shocked to see how well he played a tough guy. His Detective has all the charm, energy and toughness, which is expected in a film like this. Ireland is terrific as the thug and Ryan does a nice job, although she's not on the same level as the two men. There's also a wonderful fight between two women, which has to be seen to be believed.

Set Up! or Framed! might be better titles than Railroaded! While it's true that the police pursue their suspect (Ed Kelly) with undue alacrity, it's also true that they're only following a trail of maliciously planted evidence. And an odd feature of the movie is that Kelly remains almost an incidental character (not even appearing in the credits); the focus stays on the police and the real behind-the-scenes villain.

Brash blonde Jane Randolph operates a little beauty salon that's really a front for a back-room book. One night a couple of masked robbers knock it over, but things go wrong: A beat cop is killed, and one of the gunmen (Keefe Brasselle) takes a bullet. Soon detective Hugh Beaumont knocks on Kelly's door, led there by the boy's monogrammed navy scarf, a sighting of his van at the scene, and a description provided by Randolph. Even Brasselle, bandaged up like the Invisible Man, names Kelly in deathbed testimony.

The only one who believes his innocence is his sister (Sheila Ryan). Luckily, Beaumont knows her from the old neighborhood and still is a bit sweet on her. Unluckily, so is the man who set up her brother (John Ireland) as part of a coverup to swindle the head of the syndicate both he and Randolph work for. Little by little, the craftily stitched-together ruse starts to pull apart at the seams, and the hotheaded Ireland grows more reckless and violent...

Directed by Anthony Mann just before his collaboration with cinematographer John Alton took his work to a new plateau, Railroaded! displays some of his trademark tricks (a taut story line; swift and unexpected burst of violence; shadows used not merely as mood but visual metaphors).

And Ireland gets not only top billing but one of his best roles. When he's not slapping around Randolph for her sloppy drinking (in the grand tradition of alcoholic molls like Claire Trevor in Key Largo and Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat), he's fetishistically perfuming his bullets. He's quite the sex-equals-violence kind of guy; when Randolph and Ryan get into a hair-pulling tussle, he watches from an alcove with a nasty smirk on his face, and his gun barrel unconsciously traces the action. It's as if it's deciding who will be the lucky recipient of its payload.

Anthony Mann directed some of the very best noirs of the 1940s and early 1950s.

This one is brutal, hard-hitting, and unrelenting till its Hollywood ended. (The ending may have been tacked on. I don't know. But it works organically with the whole, unlike many others.)

The problem for me with some of his movies, this one included, is that they are so dark they're almost impossible to see at times. Yes, it's atmospheric. But it's also frustrating.

The literal noir in some -- not all -- of his movies reminds me of the staging of Wagner at the Metropolitan Opera. Yes, it's brooding and intense. But it's also really hard to see.