STACK #162 April 2018

EXTRAS FEATURE

visit stack.com.au

The Actor and The Mob

where she had been invited to make a film. Raft’s job was to act as a bodyguard for Guinan whilst she starred in her first talking picture, Queen of the Night Clubs  (1929). On Guinan’s insistence, Raft was given a small part in the film as a dancer and so made his screen debut. He decided to stay in L.A. to pursue his dance/movie career and managed to get uncredited dancing and gangster roles in a number of motion pictures. Raft’s old New York dance pal, James Cagney (who had just had a huge hit playing a gangster in  The Public Enemy ), requested George – in an unbilled part – to play his rival in a dancing competition sequence in the Warner Bros. production, Taxi  (1932). This led to Raft being cast in what would become his career-making role as a loyal henchman in  Scarface  (1932), with Paul Muni in the title role. Muni’s role as Tony “Scarface” Camonte was based on the Chicago mobster Al Capone, whilst the character Guino Rinaldo was modelled on Capone’s bodyguard, Frank Rio. The film’s director, Howard Hawks, had been impressed with Raft’s debonair and uniquely sinister appearance in  Taxi  and signed him up

George Raft (1901-1980) From Hell's Kitchen to Hollywood Part 1:

G eorge Raft was not a great movie actor but during the 1930s and into the mid ‘40s, his onscreen presence made him a big movie star. Along with Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, Raft played numerous “tough-guy” characters in the classic Hollywood gangster films. Today however, he is mainly remembered for refusing the two starring roles that made Humphrey Bogart a Hollywood superstar. George Ranft, the eldest sibling of immigrant German parents, was born and raised in the crime-infested Hell’s Kitchen district of

New York City; this led him to a lifelong affiliation with members of the Mob. The young George trained as a professional boxer but was more often a driver and gun-carrier for the mobsters who ran the many illegal rackets throughout the city. His closest underworld tie was his boyhood friend, the notorious prohibition mobster, Owney Madden, who in the late 1920s ran the legendary Cotton Club. Always impeccably dressed, George was also

Paul Muni with machine-gun and George Raft (on extreme right) in a scene from Scarface

as Camonte’s bodyguard. To cover Raft’s lack of acting experience, Hawks told him to base his character on the mannerisms of the various mobsters Raft had known in New York. Taking Hawks's advice, he developed a quiet but menacing Rinaldo and added what he described as “a bit of business” that would become Raft’s particular trademark – the casual flipping of a coin. There were a number of scenes in the film where Raft had no lines of dialogue nor any action. Rather

his dance routines around the numerous New York nightclubs and speakeasies. It was in these types of

George Raft

establishments that he met and socialised with the likes of “Scarface” Al Capone, Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. In 1929, Owney Madden suggested Raft accompany the outrageous nightclub hostess and singer, “Texas” Guinan, to Hollywood,

an excellent dancer and got his first full-time job as a “Charleston hoofer” in comedian Jimmy Durante’s club on West 58 th Street. Dropping the 'n' from his surname, Raft appeared in a number of Broadway vaudeville shows. Whenever the shows closed he took

038

APRIL 2018

jbhifi.com.au