I’ll Get By- George Raft’s I’ll Get You A Film Review

 

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Sam Lowell

I’ll Get You, starring George Raft, Sally Gray, 1952

 

I have been running the rack on the old black and white film noir genre the past several years mainly grabbing stuff from the Netflix archives (“running the rack” a term learned in my pool hall days when I hung around with corner boys who hung around pool halls although I was never much of a player, mainly a hanger-on and bettor, a bettor against a guy like Red Radley who lost me more money than I could shake a stick at-not realizing until much later that Red was cheating, was threating murder and mayhem against whoever he was playing against and he was big enough to enforce his edicts). At this point since I have been pretty steady in my attempts to see plenty of them I have moved down, or been forced by Hollywood’s tastes to move down, the A classics like The Postman Always Rings Twice,  The Big Sleep, Out Of The Past and a few others and hit the B-films of late. Maybe B minus as is the case here in this police procedural out of London town I’ll Get You starring old time 1930s heavy gangster George Raft.

This time out Raft plays an undercover FBI guy working on an international kidnapping case in London. And if you are talking about FBI guys working on anything in the 1940s and 1950s then you are talking about something related to the red menace, the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its nefarious plans for world conquest (according to the Washington propaganda campaign and what did we know about such plans and if there such plans when it came right down to it) as the Cold War got icier as the decade after World War II went on. Here Raft, posing as a scientist after giving the Brits the slip entering London finally winds up working along with a fetching woman British agent (okay, okay, MI5) played by Sally Gray to find out what the hell happened to a few nuclear scientists who were abducted and sent behind the Iron Curtain. Sent there obviously to be grilled, and maybe more, by the bad guys who wanted to get the latest up-to-date information on whatever level the Americans had worked out making nuclear weapons even more deadly.    

Naturally the hook here has to be a sinister Mister Blank, Grand in the story line but everybody over the age of twelve knows that is strictly a front, an alias, who is manipulating the action behind the scenes and trying to keep the Anglo-American attempts to get the scientists back from succeeding. The whole story line is run as a bunch of cover plays and ploys with one side leading the other on wild goose chases until Raft pulls the hammer down. Naturally as well when there is a female agent involved whether here on in a James Bond vehicle there is romance in the air. Despite that slight diversion Raft and the boys grab the bad guys and all is well for a while-until the next turn in the Cold War battles. So you can see now why this one is a strictly B effort, not more. Got it.