San Quentin ** (1946, Lawrence Tierney, Barton MacLane, Marian Carr, Harry Shannon, Raymond Burr) – Classic Movie Review 11,482

RKO’s 1946 thriller film San Quentin features Raymond Burr, aged 29, in his credited film début as ruthless killer Jeff Torrance.

Director Gordon M Douglas’s 1946 RKO Radio Pictures thriller film San Quentin features Raymond Burr, aged 29, in his credited film début as a ruthless killer Jeff Torrance (establishing what would be his usual big-screen persona) in this story about a convict Jim Roland (Lawrence Tierney) who starts up a scheme to help ex-cons on the outside, but is hoodwinked into involvement with San Quentin State Prison inmate Nick Taylor (Barton MacLane)’s escape plan.

Warden Kelly (Harry Shannon), the warden of San Quentin, takes three model prisoners to a press event in San Francisco, but Nick Taylor escapes and Warden Kelly enlists Taylor’s old enemy Jim Roland, to bring him back.

San Quentin is an unremarkable but watchable and interesting B-movie, with an intense atmosphere and especially good performances from Tierney, MacLane, Shannon and Burr.

The cast are Lawrence Tierney as Jim Roland, Barton MacLane as Nick Taylor, Marian Carr as Betty Richards, Harry Shannon as Warden Kelly, Carol Forman as Ruthie, Joe Devlin as ‘Broadway’ Johnson, Tom Keene as Hal Schaeffer, Tony Barrett as Steve Marlowe, Lee Bonnell as Joe Carzoni, Robert Clarke as Tommy North, Raymond Burr as Jeff Torrance, Byron Foulger, Selmer Jackson, and Herbert Rawlinson.

One-time Sing Sing warden Lewis E Lawes praises the inmates’ Mutual Welfare League at the start of the film.

It premiered in Boston on December 8, 1946 and was released in the US on December 17, 1946.

It runs 66 minutes.

William Raymond Stacy Burr was born May 21, 1917, in New Westminster, British Columbia, and made his stage debut aged 12 with a Vancouver stock company. Burr moved to New York in 1940 and his Broadway appearances led to a contract with RKO Radio Pictures. He appeared in more than 50 films between 1946 and 1957 in a gallery of villains that established him as a film noir icon.

Burr recalled: ‘I was just a fat heavy. I never got the girl but I once got the gorilla in a 3D picture called Gorilla at Large. I menaced Claudette Colbert, Lizabeth Scott, Paulette Goddard, Anne Baxter, Barbara Stanwyck. Those girls would take one look at me and scream, and can you blame them?’

The Best of Burr: Desperate (1947), Sleep, My Love (1948), Raw Deal (1948), Pitfall (1948), Abandoned (1949), Red Light (1949), M (1951), His Kind of Woman (1951), The Blue Gardenia (1953), Walk a Crooked Mile (1948), Borderline (1950), Unmasked (1950), The Whip Hand (1951), FBI Girl (1951), Meet Danny Wilson (1952), Rear Window (1954), They Were So Young (1954), A Cry in the Night (1956), Affair in Havana (1957), and Crime of Passion (1957).

© Derek Winnert 2021 Classic Movie Review 11,482

Link to Derek Winnert’s home page for more reviews: http://derekwinnert.com/