Railroaded (1947)

Did you ever picture Beaver Cleaver's dad as a square-jawed detective? Didn't think so; and your intuition is dead on - Hugh Beaumont doesn't make much of a cop, but that's not the real weakness here in Anthony Mann's Railroaded - it's a combination of lack of a good script, weak dialog, and no strong lead character.

Still, it is an interesting little excursion into the dark world of film noir because it is one of Anthony Mann's early attempts to captivate, and it shows how far he would progress as he soon as he teamed up with legendary cinematographer John Alton and made the seminal films noir T-Men and Raw Deal. Railroaded, although dark, actually skirts around the edges of noir, because the lines of good and evil are pretty well delineated. In the best noirs all are compromised and fate is stalking and its only a matter of time before it strikes.

The movie concerns a robbery and shooting of a beat cop who happens on the scene. We later learn the robbery is an inside job, with the apparent victim benefiting, or hoping to, anyway. Meanwhile, a patsy is booked for the homicide and all evidence is carefully contrived to point to him as the guilty party. Only his sister (Sheila Ryan) believes he is innocent and she goes on a one-woman crusade to get to the bottom of the story.

The screenplay, as I mentioned, is strictly paint by numbers and runs out of ideas quite soon after the decent opening scenes showing the robbery and its immediate aftermath. Therefore, the story begins to create new things for the protagonist (Ireland) to do that frankly do not make sense and only serve to form clues to implicate him in what was at first an-open-and-shut case against the patsy. Of course, Ireland is often given the option of using his gun, and he usually selects that method of solving his problems. The dead bodies and 38 caliber bullets only serve to link him to the original killing also. But Duke (Ireland) is a stupid criminal. Lots of ideas are started only to be inexplicably dropped. Beaumont notices the bullet the coroner dug out of the policeman smells like perfume. That never pays off. The final denouement - a shootout in a darkened room - is a bit tense but they even allow the tension to dissipate from that scene.

Familiar face John Ireland has a resume of hundreds of screen appearances - usually as a villain or sidekick of the leading man, often in a high budget John Wayne or Kirk Douglas production; however, Ireland has very few leading roles, and after seeing Railroaded, you'll agree it was with good reason. The man, while having a few interesting quirks, basically doesn't have enough shtick to take center stage and do a full movie.

The supporting parts are played by equally uninspired performers like Hugh Beaumont, also familiar looking but not interesting enough to flesh out a full-fledged leading man. Jane Randolph and Sheila Ryan play the women with Randolph an acceptable femme fatale, until she turns yella towards the end. Ryan and Randolph also have quite a good knock-down, drag-out catfight, which is always of interest because they are so rarely seen in film.

The DVD is by Kino Video and they claim it is digitally remastered. The video and audio is good and the Guy Roe cinematography shows just how good John Alton was. Roe shoots everything almost too dark while Alton always manages to maintain a slim sliver of key lighting along the edges of the main element in the frame. It's interesting to see the different approaches.

There are no other extras included with Railroaded and I would only recommend this movie to die-hard noir fans or Anthony Mann completists as there is nothing here that hasn't been done better elsewhere.

Available for purchase separately, it is also included in the Kino five title set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Hollywood for considerable savings.

Better Anthony Mann movies -

T-Men
Raw Deal
He Walked By Night

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: None of the Above