Under the Gun (1951)

Directed by Ted Tetzlaff; produced by Ralph Dietrich

Bert Galvin (Richard Conte) is a smooth and shady businessman infatuated with singer Ruth Williams (Audrey Totter). At last persuading her to go to New York with him, they stop at a small restaurant. While there, a man with a grudge against him wants to kill Galvin, but Galvin kills him first, in circumstances that could not be termed self-defence, and is sentenced to twenty years on a prison farm. The rich and clever Galvin doesn’t intend to stay there, though, and starts plotting his escape, no matter how deadly the risks might be - to himself or to others.

A good crime-movie lifted by its performances and script, Under the Gun is let down somewhat by the ending, though not enough to cancel a recommendation. Conte gives an admirable performance in the type of rôle he could play well. Though he could take on sympathetic characters (as in Hollywood Story, reviewed on this blog in February, 2024), he slips easily into Bert Galvin’s character, and makes him intelligent, ruthless, arrogant and remorseless - in ways that aren’t all that obvious.

Audrey Totter has what might be considered a reduced part for someone at this point of her career: though she has a major rôle, she’s not seen for the middle three fifths of the film. She adopts a squeakier voice than her real one, and seems a singer from the 1930s, rather than the early ‘50s, though that is actually her singing in the night-club.

This is a movie in which the supporting characters are important to the story and the atmosphere. Galvin’s fellow prisoners are an assorted lot, each quirky without being unrealistic. Royal Dano as prison trusty Nugent, Richard Taber as slightly unhinged Five Shot and, especially Sam Jaffe, as the quiet, observant Gower, are stand-outs, though Shepperd Strudwick, as Galvin’s competent and crooked lawyer, is equally good.

Tetzlaff performs another competent job as director, as he had with Riffraff (reviewed in March of this year), though, for the most part, without providing anything extraordinary. The exception is, as with Riffraff, the opening sequence. It features Conte slumbering in the back of a convertible. The camera closes in on him as he converses with the driver, then retreats again. It was clearly filmed with moving automobiles, perhaps one of the first instances of such a sequence (instead of using a back-screen, or immobile car-frames on trailers for steadiness.)

The story could have ended better. I wonder how many writers sacrificed a good, ironic conclusion for the sake of the action that a producer or director thought an audience would have preferred. The finish here is fitting, but not as fitting as it could have been.

All in all, Under the Gun is, while not excellent, nonetheless a good entry in the crime-drama category, and will entertain for its 83 minutes.