Broadway

“I’d do murder for you.” Loosely inspired by George Raft’s early life as a Broadway entertainer mixed up with gangsters, William A. Seiter’s Broadway holds a unique position as the only noir in which the star plays himself. (Raft’s life was filmed again in 1961 in Joseph M. Newman’s The George Raft Story, but this time Ray Danton played the lead.) Framed by a flashback Raft shares with a night watchman (Arthur Shields) at the site of his old nightclub, the film mashes backstage melodrama with the gangster underworld, all the action unfolding at the Paradise Club where Raft and his dancing partner Billie Moore (Janet Blair) are the most popular act. Much to Raft’s disapproval, Billie’s dating Steve Crandall (Broderick Crawford), a bootlegging gangster who supplies the club’s illegal booze and who’s the primary suspect in homicide detective Dan McCorn’s (Pat O’Brien) investigation of the murder of competing bootlegger Scar Edwards (Damien O’Flynn) on club premises by a bullet in the back. A cast of supporting characters adds lots of color: Iris Adrian as ditzy dancer Maisie with the piercing Brooklyn accent, S.Z. Sakall as hapless, jolly club owner Nick, and Anne Gwynne as the impressionable Pearl who ends up with a pistol in her hand, among others. While the film sanitizes much of Raft’s past, it’s still a pleasant surprise for viewers who only know Raft from his stiff noir roles to see him come alive on stage like a limber dancing doll.