George Raft

You've probably heard of him but many these days have not.  He was never much of an actor and used to say so all the time.  He also addressed how ill-at-ease he was and how he never had any particular acting skills he could think of.  All I could do was be me, he mused.  On the other hand, how many actors have been the subject of a movie biography?  George Raft has.  Let's find out why.

Can you imagine an actor telling a director to give him fewer lines, to let someone else in the scene say his words?  Raft did that.  Armed with this information, try out one of his flicks someday and note how little he says and how chatty his costars are.

Even if I, as one who loves watching actors act, could keep from shouting out hey, George, get out of the business, I find it unforgivable that along with staying near mute, he was also wooden in everything he did.  I could probably count on both hands how many time I remember seeing him smile, much less laugh.  Despite what he said about his acting, he did make a handful of movies that I enjoyed.

George's life always had an anchor hanging on it... his underworld connections.  In his early nightclub career, the joints were usually mafia-owned.  He owned casinos.  His manner of dress, language and demeanor screamed out thug.  In his early life he became good friends Benjamin Siegel, later gaining infamy as Bugsy Siegel, the wheel man for the mob.  George had numerous brushes with the law.

He was, for the most part, cast as a criminal in films.  He made 80 and died in most of them.  If he wasn't a crook, then he was a cop... sometimes even a good cop.  Regardless, he played a tough guy... I think it's safe to say always.  His period was the thirties and with each succeeding decade, he worked less and less.  There came a time when the Hollywood honchos just didn't want to be around him anymore.

Born into abject poverty in 1895 in New York's Hell's Kitchen, his early life was anything but rosy.  He had to work when he was still quite young, usually as a errand boy for those who needed one, and often as a fish wrapper.   He quit school at 12 and left home the following year.  He said he was illiterate his entire life. 

For a year he worked as an apprentice electrician.  Always a scrappy kid, perhaps it was Siegel or some of the other boys who suggested he take up prizefighting.  He was at that awhile with some success and played baseball in the minor leagues.  He was a far better fighter than a baseball player.

Raft said it was at this time that he realized young people were getting paid to dance and he could do that.  His mother taught him how when he was quite young and he had danced in several outdoor venues such as parks and carnivals. 

He got on as a taxi dancer and from there to the New York nightclub scene.  He ran into Rudolph Valentino a number of times.  The two of them looked similar with the slicked-back hair and the snappy clothes.  Raft claimed he was not an especially good dancer and what people took to was his erotic dancing which included him touching himself.

With Vera Zorina 

He left for Europe to help popularize the tango.  Ladies loved dancing with George and he loved dancing with them.  He was always and forever a ladies' man.  He claimed he never hit a woman and said the fairer sex was to be revered and kept on a pedestal.  He won honors for his charleston and got in tighter with the mob when he began working at Texas Guinan's popular speakeasy.  His fast feet with maybe some special connections got him dancing gigs on Broadway.

In 1923 Raft married (some sources say for the second time) but they separated shortly thereafter.  Because of her Catholicism they remained married until her death in 1970 and Raft supported her all those years.  He had many, many affairs over the years, some serious, but he preferred to remain, as he said, free.

He occasionally did some driving for one of his favorite hoods, Owney Madden, who thought George ought to try Hollywood where the mob was prospering.  At the same time he was being threatened by a cuckolded husband so moving west seemed like a good idea.  Georgie holds some kind of a Hollywood record for being named in divorce suits.

Raft liked to say that he was sitting in the Brown Derby restaurant minding his own business while looking dashing when a Hollywood type approached him and offered him a role.  It's more likely that Madden orchestrated it with the help of Guinan who was the star of Raft's first film in 1929.  At Paramount he made eight more films, all in small and often uncredited parts.

Then Raft was signed to costar in Scarface (1932) and his stylish work in the film and the great success of the film itself secured him a place in the minds of the public.  As Paul Muni's coin-flipping, right-hand man who marries Muni's sister and is murdered for doing so, he was on his way.  

He costarred with gruff Wallace Beery and cute little Jackie Cooper in The Bowery (1933), a lively tale about bitter rivals out to be top dog at their Gay 90s establishments.  Fay Wray had the female lead (the same year she made King Kong) and Lucille Ball had her first movie role.

Bolero (1934) is one of the best chances to see Raft's dancing.  Costarring with Carole Lombard, they became an item off screen as well.  They were ideally suited... they both enjoyed nothing more than a good romp.  The following year he costarred with two popular singers, Alice Faye and Frances Langford, in a rare comedy, Every Night at Eight, and proved he was far too serious and uneasy for light-hearted fare.

The adventure yarn Souls at Sea (1937) focuses on the slave trade in the mid-1800s.  By this time Raft was a big deal at Paramount and his costar, Gary Cooper, was another.  Raft wasn't all that crazy about being top-billed and having the responsibility of carrying a movie.  He preferred sharing the screen with another top male star and he made a career out of doing so.  Raft was billed over Henry Fonda in Spawn of the North (1938), all about salmon fishing and two men who are at odds with one another.  Dorothy Lamour got in the middle.

Though a big star at Paramount, the suits were getting tired of Raft.  Cocky, frequently refusing roles, walking off sets, seemingly nonplussed when suspended, it was noted that Raft frequently discussed things with clenched fists.  Whether to let him go or not, given Raft's circle of good buddies, must have weighed on them but in the end security walked him to the front gate.

Shortly thereafter he joined the ranks at Warner Bros and let there be no doubt that it was the perfect place for him.  No studio loved crime and crooks more.  It was where the tough guys hung out, yes it was, you dirty rats... like James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart.  Raft knew it would be a rough road because not only could they play his parts better than he did but they were all so competitive with one another.  Georgie was too laid-back to sniff and snort and paw at the ground to get some movie part but he knew he needed to work... nonstop womanizing was expensive.

You've caught on that he lived like a hood so add to those pictures his treatment of women.  His crowd treated them like queens, lavishing them with gifts, clothes, private masseuses and just about anything else they craved.  Of course he was always faithless.  As George's homes got more lavish and the closets larger and larger, he loved playing host and his female friends got real comfy.  A woman in George's pad wanted for nothing.

It didn't hurt that his pal Bugsy moved in with him.  Bugsy wanted to move more and more into the movie world and knew Georgie by this point could help.  They shared carnal interests, they shared women, they tag-teamed, they whooped and hollered.  Bugsy should have been the movie star of the two... he was every bit as elegant as George and far better-looking.  

Raft was seen everywhere with MGM queen Norma Shearer, a recent widow and now ready to stretch a little.  Mae West preferred staying at home.  George had worked with West and would again in their dotage.  They didn't date as much as they just boinked when either of them got twitchy, which was often. 

He hated the thought of getting back to work.  But he must have not minded so much making Each Dawn I Die (1939) with Cagney because he got good notices.  Everyone did.  It's about the relationship of an innocent man (Cagney) sent to prison and a hard-core gangster (Raft) who comes to figure prominently in his life.  Cagney, of course, acted Raft off the screen but it was a seminal film for Raft.  It's a goodie.

Holden, Raft and Bogart

I have remembered Invisible Stripes (1939) because of a trio of stars... Raft, Bogart and William Holden.  Raft, out of prison and intending to go straight, gets bent out of shape when he finds his younger brother wants to begin a life of crime.  It is a decent noir but didn't do well.

Bogart and Raft would be inexorably linked together.  Their next costarring venture was the terrific noir, They Drive by Night (1940).  Raft is top-billed and Bogie as his brother are truckers who deal with thugs and women.  Ann Sheridan is Raft's galpal and Ida Lupino is nothing short of sensational in her wickedness.  Raft is credited with saving Bogie's life on an outdoor set when a runaway semi almost mowed him down.

After the film, he restructured his old vaudeville act and took it on the road.  Sometimes his girlfriend Betty Grable would accompany him.  Their dating escapades gathered some ink for a few years, right up until she married bandleader Harry James in 1943.  They loved, argued, laughed, danced and played the ponies.  She was probably the one who got away, but ultimately she wanted more than Raft was willing to provide.

On the town with Betty Grable

Raft's reputation, of course, preceded him when he came to Warners.  He was lectured about turning down films.  Whether true or not, someone at Paramount said he turned down more films than he accepted.  Warner producer Hal Wallis said:  Our association with Raft was a constant struggle, from start to finish.  Hypersensitive to public accusations of underworld connections, he flatly refused to play the heavy in any film.  The studio was also annoyed because he told them he would no longer die in a movie. Nothing apparently worked because Raft continued to turn down many films.  Most famous among them were two in 1941... High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon.  Bogie owed Raft his thanks... these films made him a star.

Instead, Raft elected to make Manpower (1941) with the last of his tough-guy cohorts, Edward G. Robinson, and also Marlene Dietrich.  It is another triangle mess concerning two linemen and a sultry cafe hostess.  I liked the flick but actually thought of several others who would have been more realistic in the roles.  While Grable was putting in some overtime hoofing over at Fox, Raft and Dietrich had become oh-so-close.  

Getting down with Dietrich

Close would not have described Raft's relationship with Robinson who said Raft was touchy, difficult and thoroughly impossible to play with.  In many ways that could have been said about Robinson
as well.  He was well-regarded as an actor among his peers but he could be cantankerous on a film.  The end result was that the two got into a fist fight on the set.  Two years later it would happen again between Raft and Peter Lorre on the set of Background to Danger, a Casablanca knockoff.  He also nailed a few producers.

Around this time, Raft might have saved Cagney's life.  Cagney had become the president of the Screen Actor's Guild and rubbed some folks the wrong way when he wouldn't let them nose into the guild.  Raft got wind of the mob's plan to drop a weighty klieg light on Cagney on a movie sound stage and used his influence to have the hit stopped.

In 1943 he left Warners even more unceremoniously than he had Paramount.  No one was sorry to see him go.  He was a time bomb and a pain in the ass.  What he probably didn't realize at the time was his career would never again be the same.  He had bitten the hand that fed him way too many times.  It was said that Jack Warner was poised to offer Raft ten thousand dollars to leave but Raft misunderstood (probably due to his being illiterate) and wrote out a check to Warner.

In 1944 he turned down the Fred MacMurray role in Double Indemnity (remember he died, or was it because Robinson was also being pitched a role?) and instead made Nob Hill (1945).  It may have been the first time I saw Raft's inscrutable expression on the screen (not at the time, of course, but aren't you adorable for thinking I saw it on opening night).  I've always been kinda fond of the tale of a Barbary Coast (again!) proprietor who longs for life up on (s)Nob Hill.  Most of the acting plaudits went to Vivian Blaine and Joan Bennett.

I also liked Johnny Angel (1945).  (He was born to play a Johnny and would do so again in 1949 with Johnny Allegro.)  It's a tasty little noir about a sea captain trying to discover why his father was killed on a ship.  It gets murky before the end credits and much allure is provided by noir queen Claire Trevor and Signe Hasso.
The 1946 noir Nocturne gave Raft a shot at playing in several flicks as a cop.  Here he goes deep into a suicide case to prove that it was actually homicide.  Torrid Lynn Bari as a suspect is a good match for the actor.

Bugsy and Georgie

Also in 1946 he got caught up in a tax evasion inquiry that brought about some unsavory headlines as did questioning him on the killing of his buddy Bugsy Siegel the following year.  

By the early fifties he was in Europe trying unsuccessfully to establish himself in their films.  He also tried a short-lived TV series.  He opened a high-class gambling joint in England before the Brits kicked him out and banned him from re-entering the country.  Later in the decade he would co-own and greet customers at a mob-backed casino in Havana.  We will be kind to not mention his films between 1947-53.

He was so thrilled that MGM offered him a role in an A flick that he didn't mind playing a gangster.  In Rogue Cop (1954) Raft kills a young cop and his older brother, Robert Taylor, also a cop, comes after him.  20th Century Fox had hopes for Black Widow (1954) because Ginger Rogers, Van Heflin, Gene Tierney and Raft would star in the suspenser about a young woman who is killed and most in the glamorous cast are suspects.  Raft plays a cop, Rogers overacts, Tierney shows signs of being on the brink of her mental illness and Heflin outshines them all.  Unfortunately it was not a success.

Hollywood may never forget but it does often forgive which is the only explanation for Raft costarring with Edward G. Robinson in  A Bullet for Joey (1955).  It is a film noir with Cold War overtures about a gangster (guess who?) who goes to Montreal to kidnap a nuclear physicist and the police inspector (Robinson) who is on to him.  Audrey Totter as a moll is the best thing about it.  The silly title didn't help make it a success.

With Tony Curtis and Marilyn Monroe

The most famous movie Raft would ever make was the 1959 comedy Some Like It Hot (1959) in which he had a small role lampooning his own gangster image.  He hoped it might reignite his screen career but that didn't happen.

Raft, plagued with financial woes, agreed to a screen treatment of his life story and the The George Raft Story (1961) was the result.  If any actor's life was worthy of this, it was Georgie.  But just to be sure there would be no problems, most people's names were changed.  Ray Danton in the best role of his career did Raft proud.  Jayne Mansfield and Julie London helped with the romance.

Showing a move to Ray Danton

With one exception the remainder of his films were pretty bad.  The worst, absolute trash, is Sextette (1997) with his old squeeze Mae West in her final film.  Raft played himself as he did in nine other films.  This must be some kind of record.

How appropriate his final movie would be called The Man with Bogart's Face (1980).  It's a comedy-drama starring Robert Sacchi, an actor who looked so much like Bogie that Lauren Bacall did a double-take.  It concerns a modern-day detective who handles and solves his cases in the same way Bogie did in the 40s.  Raft had a small role.  The film is a hoot.  Too bad he didn't see this film but he claimed he never saw a single one of his films.

A life-long heavy smoker (but non-drinker), Raft died of emphysema at age 79 in 1980 in Los Angeles.  His life was the stuff of Hollywood legend.  His career was a textbook lesson in how not to be an actor.  Shortly before his death Raft claimed that his 10 million dollar fortune had all but vanished.  When a reporter asked how that was possible, Raft famously replied part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses, part for women and the rest I spent foolishly.


Next posting:
a fifties' film