Race Street

While it may not boast any extraordinary assets, Edwin Marin’s Race Street is a rock solid noir based on a seamless script by Martin Rackin that contains a wide range of noir tropes we’ve come to love (gangsters, night clubs, zealous cop, femme fatale, and the chump who just can’t catch a break). The film centers on yet another reliable performance by the stiff and stoic George Raft, the equivalent of noir comfort food, as a bookie trying to go straight; Race Street is one of four noirs Raft made for RKO and one of more than a dozen he made overall. Having just opened a new nightclub, his first honest business venture, Gannin (Raft) receives a visit from two elegant goons who work for crime kingpin Phil Dickson (Frank Faylen) selling him on a protection “insurance” policy (the threat delivered as a professional sales pitch is amusingly done: “We’re go-getters”). Around the same time, Gannin’s childhood friend and former partner Hal Towers (Harry Morgan) is tossed down the stairs to his death by the same goons (the slow zoom into Raft’s face upon discovering the body is a beautiful touch), setting Gannin on a path of revenge which concerns his girlfriend Robbie (Marilyn Maxwell), a war widow who may have her own connection to the racketeers. William Bendix plays another childhood friend, police lieutenant Runson, whose pressure on Gannin to cooperate with his investigation continually falls on deaf ears. Note the unusually staged musical number performed by Gale Robbins, who appears to float above and across the nightclub audience as if on a precisely calibrated crane.