Riffraff (1947)

Directed by Ted Tetzlaff; produced by Nat Holt

An aeroplane takes off from Peru with two passengers and lands in Panama with one, who says his fellow inexplicably jumped out half-way through the flight. The survivor (Marc Krah) hires Dan Hammer (Pat O’Brien), part-time private eye, part-time bodyguard, all-time fixer, to protect him. Before Hammer can start his job, though, his client is murdered, and suddenly, several interested parties are after a map the dead man was carrying - and they all think Hammer knows where it is.

A fun, entertaining film noir in a slightly lighter-hearted vein than one such as The Big Sleep, Riffraff could very well have been a Humphrey Bogart vehicle. Instead, it’s Pat O’Brien who’s the hard-boiled hero. Though he is known today for playing Catholic priests, O’Brien took on such roles rarely, in terms of his total output, and was a tough guy more often than clergyman.

The producers may have taken a chance on O’Brien, 48 years old by this time and more than a little stocky, with a double chin. Set in the tropics, Riffraff shows Hammer in shirtsleeves quite frequently, so there’s no hiding his hefty girth. Yet such an admission of age adds to the character; more should have been made of Hammer’s obvious long experience in dangerous and shady dealings. As it is, O’Brien is both convincing and sympathetic in the part.

Other actors are equally successful. Anne Jeffreys plays the expected love interest, tough-talking but not as tough acting as some film noir dames, and provides a fresh face, despite this being her thirty-fourth film. Her road to Hollywood was unusual: trained as an opera singer, she was the lead in a number of big productions at Carnegie Hall before turning to the big screen. Percy Kilbride fills the part of side-kick and comic relief, and does a better job at both than many who have taken such parts. His interaction with O’Brien is genuinely amusing.

The writing is good, though the premise bears a resemblance to 1944’s To Have and Have Not, with the expatriate American in an exotic setting taking odd - and sometimes crooked - jobs; the older sidekick; the newly arrived girl (Jeffreys’s character, like Bacall’s in the earlier film, works as a singer in a bar); the police officer associate (George Givot as Major Rues, of the ‘Panama Secret Police’). Fortunately, Hammer’s milieu is made different from that of Bogart’s ‘Steve’ Morgan, more intimate and local. The story itself is not a mystery, nor is it very exciting, though what it lacks in tension it makes up for in entertainment.

(As regards the main character’s name, Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury, the first Mike Hammer movie, was published the same year as Riffraff was released. Spillane’s Hammer made appearances in comic books previously, but under different names. It seems, considering the timing of both works, that neither could have influenced the other.)

The direction is very good, especially the opening scene, a knock-out of suspense and foreshadowing conducted without dialogue. The rest of the film does not live up to this scene’s standard, nor does the atmosphere created in the first ten minutes follow through to the other seventy. But Tetzlaff does very well, adding enough footage of real Panama - including views from a moving taxi-cab, that make the rest seem less like back-lot movie-making.

Tetzlaff directed a few other films, including the successful The Window (reviewed on this blog in November, 2020), but worked in cinematography on a fair number of very good films, such as The Talk of the Town, the 1936 version of My Man Godfrey, The More the Merrier and Notorious. Better in that job than in the director’s chair, Tetzlaff’s work here is nonetheless commendable.

Overall, Riffraff is an enjoyable, undeservedly overlooked winner in the film noir genre.