Railroaded! (1947)

Directed by Anthony Mann; produced by Charles Reiner

An illegal bookie joint hidden in a beauty salon is robbed at gunpoint. An inside job, vicious criminal Duke Martin (John Ireland) and his pal Kowalski (Keefe Brasselle) are aided by Clara Calhoun (Jane Randolph), who runs the establishment. Their plan is to blame everything on innocent Steve Ryan (Ed Kelly), Kowalski’s co-worker. The plan goes well, with Ryan on course for the gas chamber, when Clara starts feeling her conscience, and Detective Sergeant Mickey Ferguson (Hugh Beaumont) gets a bad feeling about the case.

A competently done crime thriller, Railroaded! benefits from decent writing and a good performance by John Ireland. Though he plays a villain, as he often did in his long career, and was a character actor, not one of Hollywood’s top draws, Ireland receives prime billing on screen. This is an indication of his significance in the film, and the lack of ‘names’ in the cast. Railroaded! is strictly a B movie.

Nonetheless, the cast does a good job. Though B movies were populated with actors who, if they made it to better productions, never rose above supporting level - many of them never rose above that in B movies, either - it does not mean that they didn’t give competent performances in lesser works. Kelly, Beaumont, and Charles D Brown as a police captain (he seemed often to be cast as high-ranking officers of the law), all provide good results.

As noted above, Ireland plays the chief villain; he has a strong sense of menace about him, and even when he portrayed good guys (as in All the King’s Men, and Spartacus), he gave the impression that it was best not to turn one’s back on him.

The direction by Mann is very good, as might be expected. In his early day, Mann gave good value for the budgets he had to work with. He brings natural performances from his actors, and puts them in settings that help the story. The production values are predictably ordinary, with standard sets used.

The writing is above par for the type of story, combining with the direction to make for some compelling and informative scenes, even without the use of words. Nonetheless, the script aids the actors, such as when the police captain is annoyed with Ferguson, with whom he is on a first-name basis, and pointedly calls him ‘sergeant’, to which Ferguson, equally annoyed, responds with an equally pointed ‘captain’.

While not really memorable, Railroaded! is a quickly-paced, typically short (72 minutes) crime drama entry worth the time put in to watch it. (Note: though the posters for the movie omit the exclamation mark in the title, it is clearly present in the opening credits.)