No, seriously, he is ! The film starts out with a playboy composing a goodbye song for his latest cast off. You can only see her legs as she sits on a couch nearby. The guy even has pictures of past conquests covering the walls of his living room. You'd think that would give a girl a hint! But in mid composition you hear a shot ring out and the playboy is dead.
Enter the cops - and George Raft as homicide detective Joe Warne. The police find powder burns on the victim's hands and head, and with the gun nearby, the conclusion is suicide. But Joe is unconvinced. The victim had nothing going wrong in his life and apparently killed himself mid composition. So Joe goes looking for the murderer, but he is rather rough about it, knocking citizens into swimming pools and waking babies in the middle of the night with all of his fist to cuffs. And so first he is warned, and then he is fired from the force. And yet he persists in spite of the fact, to quote Frank Drebbin from "Police Squad" - "The next time I shoot somebody it could be illegal".
He just keeps impersonating an officer - so he could be arrested himself - to try to find a murderer that might not exist IF it was suicide like everybody else says, and he didn't even know the victim or his family either. An explanation is never given as to why he would risk livelihood and then jail. And yet the film works because it moves quickly from scene to scene, not spending time to linger, and keeps your interest with a crowd of colorful characters.
Some of the better - sometimes funny sometimes quirky - scenes : Raft taking dancing lessons and being told he'll never get the hang of it by an instructor. Raft was famous as a dancer before he became an actor; A suspect claims she is innocent and when her appeals to Joe's ego and then humanity don't work, she yells to somebody in another room to throw him out of her apartment. Nothing makes a girl look more guilty than keeping a beefy bouncer around in her back bedroom in the middle of the night.
Eddie Muller had this one on TCM's Noir Alley last week and, as usual, his comments that talk about what is bad about a film as well as what is good made me decide to take a second look.
Enter the cops - and George Raft as homicide detective Joe Warne. The police find powder burns on the victim's hands and head, and with the gun nearby, the conclusion is suicide. But Joe is unconvinced. The victim had nothing going wrong in his life and apparently killed himself mid composition. So Joe goes looking for the murderer, but he is rather rough about it, knocking citizens into swimming pools and waking babies in the middle of the night with all of his fist to cuffs. And so first he is warned, and then he is fired from the force. And yet he persists in spite of the fact, to quote Frank Drebbin from "Police Squad" - "The next time I shoot somebody it could be illegal".
He just keeps impersonating an officer - so he could be arrested himself - to try to find a murderer that might not exist IF it was suicide like everybody else says, and he didn't even know the victim or his family either. An explanation is never given as to why he would risk livelihood and then jail. And yet the film works because it moves quickly from scene to scene, not spending time to linger, and keeps your interest with a crowd of colorful characters.
Some of the better - sometimes funny sometimes quirky - scenes : Raft taking dancing lessons and being told he'll never get the hang of it by an instructor. Raft was famous as a dancer before he became an actor; A suspect claims she is innocent and when her appeals to Joe's ego and then humanity don't work, she yells to somebody in another room to throw him out of her apartment. Nothing makes a girl look more guilty than keeping a beefy bouncer around in her back bedroom in the middle of the night.
Eddie Muller had this one on TCM's Noir Alley last week and, as usual, his comments that talk about what is bad about a film as well as what is good made me decide to take a second look.