Whistle Stop *** (1946, George Raft, Ava Gardner, Tom Conway, Victor McLaglen) – Classic Movie Review 12,135

Ava Gardner with Robert Mitchum In My Forbidden Past (1951).

The 1946 film noir crime thriller Whistle Stop has its charms, and many of them belong to Ava Gardner as the alluring femme fatale.

Director Léonide Moguy’s 1946 American film noir crime thriller Whistle Stop is based on a 1941 novel by Maritta M Woolf, and stars George Raft, Ava Gardner, Tom Conway, and Victor McLaglen. It has its charms, and many of them belong to Ava Gardner.

Ava Gardner plays the alluring femme fatale Mary, a woman returning to the town of her youth and finding herself caught between Kenny (George Raft), a listless bum, and Lew (Tom Conway), a sleazy bar-runner. Consumed with jealousy, Raft plots with Gillo (Victor McLaglen), Conway’s aggrieved old barkeeper, to bump off Conway.

This intriguing gangster crime thriller motors along nicely on its deliberately downbeat tale of three nobodies going nowhere fast. It may slightly lack the cutting edge that elevates some film noir thrillers into the top class, but the fine cast is its own recommendation, with the young Gardner especially effective on her way to full-blown stardom.

Philip Yordan’s screenplay, Russell Metty’s black and white cinematography, Dimitri Tiomkin’s score are all impeccably professional. The good cast also includes Jorga Curtwright, Jane Nigh, Florence Bates, Charles Drake, Charles Judels, Carmel Myers, and Jimmy Ames.

The hit movie was one of Raft’s freelance films after being dumped by Warner Bros and trying to maintain his popularity. It was made by Nero Films, and financed by a lucky Palm Springs bank.

The 23-year old Maritta Wolff wrote it as her first novel in her University of Michigan senior year. But Philip Yordan, who bought the film rights in November 1944 and wrote the screenplay, said the book was too sexually explicit: ‘I used a small portion of the actual book and developed the story from there’.

Yordan sold the project on to producer Seymour Nebenzal in February 1945 but stayed as associate producer in exchange for half the profits. Yordan said: ‘My script was very good.’ But he thought Nebenzal made a mistake casting Raft. ‘He had been a big name around the world and he was on the skids and we could afford him, but he looked like hell and who wanted to see this old man with Ava Gardner? It should have been a young guy like Burt Lancaster.’

There was a 21-year age difference. George Raft was born on September 26, 1901 and Ava Gardner was born on December 24, 1922.

Filming started on 29 June 1945 and it was released on 25 January 1946 in the US by United Artists.

It runs 85 minutes.

The good cast are George Raft as Kenny Veech, Ava Gardner as Mary, Victor McLaglen as Gitlo, Tom Conway as Lew Lentz, Jorja Curtright as Fran, Jane Nigh as Josie Veech, Florence Bates as Molly Veech, Charles Drake as Ernie, Charles Judels, Carmel Myers, and Jimmy Ames.

Maritta Martin Wolff’s second novel Night Shift was made into the 1947 film The Man I Love starring Ida Lupino and Robert Alda. Over the next 20 years she wrote four more best-selling novels: About Lyddy Thomas (1947), Back of Town (1952), The Big Nickelodeon (1956), and Buttonwood (1962).

After Wolff’s death in 2002, the manuscript for her final novel Sudden Rain, which had been kept safely in her refrigerator for the last 30 years of her life, was published in 2005 to critical acclaim.

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 12,135

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