Director Lewis Seiler started out as a gagman and graduated to helming thick-ear mellers at Warners including this entry which marked Bogie's last outing as a gangster having just scored as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon and about to score even bigger as Rick Blane in Casablanca. There's not a lot wrong with this and Seiler throws in some imaginative angles and touches of light and shade but the timing was just about as wrong as it could be - 1942, a beat or two after Pearl Harbor so that it more or less fell off the radar. Perhaps the odd man out is Howard Da Sylva, a long way from Paramount for what amounts to a nothing role, elsewhere familiar faces like Chick Chandler, Joe Downing, Stanley Ridges and Minor Watson as, what else, the warden, give solid support. Irene Manning does sterling work as the femme lead while ironically fourth-billed Susan Peters got her big break here but stopped a bullet in a hunting accident three years later cutting short a promising career.
Review of The Big Shot
