ORIGINALLY AIRED

JULY 27TH AT 8 PM ET

AUTHOR STONE WALLACE

ON ACTOR GEORGE RAFT

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GEORGE RAFT: HOLLYWOOD’S RELUCTANT GANGSTER

“I must have gone through $10 million during my career. Part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly.” – George Raft

During the filming of the 1952 movie “What Price Glory”, a bit player on the set overheard the film’s star James Cagney in discussion with actor Dan Dailey. What the bit player remembered from the conversation was how Cagney spoke with regret about the poor career choices his old Warner Brothers co-star and pal George Raft had made. Cagney lamented that if Raft had not turned down so many films that became classics, he could have become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

George Raft’s film career possesses all the elements of a Hollywood success story turned sour. At his height during the 1930s and into the mid-40s, Raft was one of the industry’s biggest and highest paid stars. During his years at Warner Brothers (1939-42) it was said that he was offered more movie roles than any other actor on the lot. The great director John Huston remembered: “Everything was intended for George Raft at the time.”

George Raft, of course, made his reputation in urban underworld roles. He was such a convincing hood that real-life gangsters, such as his pal “Bugsy” Siegel, attempted to emulate him – both in mannerism and in his style of dress. Less notorious figures like middleweight boxer Rocky Graziano likewise imitated the unique Raft image.

Yet sadly, Raft’s placement among the greats in movie history has been overshadowed by the missed opportunities that all but removed him from the pantheon of popular culture and relegated him to a virtual obscurity. The true tragedy is that it was George Raft himself who terminated his own career. Raft had scored many hits early in his career, from Scarface (1932) to Each Dawn I Die (1939), Souls at Sea (1937) to Spawn of the North (1938) and They Drive by Night (1940) to Manpower (1941). But by the late 1940s, Raft’s career was in trouble. His rejections of the films Dead End (1937), High Sierra (1941) and The Maltese Falcon (1942) pushed his rival Humphrey Bogart up the ladder to superstardom while Raft entered a decline from which he could never recover.

Nor could Raft be persuaded to take on the part of opportunistic insurance salesman in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) – Raft’s last chance to salvage his career. He had his own idiosyncratic reasons for turning down each of these projects, based primarily on his desire to be perceived by movie audiences as the “good guy” and, to a lesser extent, not to die onscreen.

To keep his career afloat and maintain his expensive lifestyle, Raft worked at lesser studios in formulaic pictures, frequently cast, at his insistence, as the “good guy”. To a public that preferred to see the actor in more sinister roles, this image quickly became tiresome and redundant.

The one-time movie legend spent his final two decades working in bits and cameos in pictures with his reputation tarnished by a slew of forgettable films and his notorious associations with the underworld.

But to audiences familiar with the screen image of George Raft, he remains perhaps the most authentic tough guy of them all.