George Raft missed out on the chance to play Rick in Casablanca (though apparently it’s not sure that he was ever formally offered the role), but Warners came up with this for him, a tale of skull-duggery and spies in Turkey, with the Germans trying to engineer a fight between Russia and Turkey. There’s a trenchcoat-wearing hero, some shady ladies, Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet, an opening montage, a finale with a plane flying off into the distance. Another film which must have influenced the makers was The 39 Steps, because it starts with our hero picked up by a sexy foreign female agent, who is then killed, and our hero finds himself blamed for her murder.
With Raft’s sinister dark looks I thought it was surprising he didn’t work more in the spy melodrama genre, until I saw this – because he plays his role pretty much like a gangster. I think he had it in him to stretch to play an agent, but he doesn’t here. Admittedly, he’s not helped by his character having slightly confused motivations (he’s an innocent, yet also an American agent). And there are some scenes which seem to come straight out of a gangster film, such as the final car chase.
Fortunately Lorre and Greenstreet are on hand. Brenda Marshall plays Lorre’s sister! The filmmakers seem to know her limitations as an actor and she never has to carry any of the scenes she is in – she doesn’t even have a love scene with Raft. This is decent exotic fun, very much B level, but lifted by the talents of the people involved. If Bogie had played Raft's role it might have been a minor classic.
NB There's a scene where Raft is pretending to be a baddie, and the baddies test his loyalty by getting him to shoot a friend (Lorre) - Raft pulls the trigger, only to find out that the gun is empty. They were just testing. And it turns out Raft knew the gun was empty from weighing it. This was later used in the Clint Eastwood movie In the Line of Fire.
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