STACK #163 May 2018

EXTRAS

FEATURE

James Cagney and George Raft in Each Dawn I Die

Humphrey Bogart, Ann Sheridan and George Raft in They Drive by Night

During his time at Warner, Raft refused the starring roles in two motion pictures that are now considered Hollywood classics. As with Dead End, the beneficiary would again be Humphrey Bogart, only this time both films would propel him to major star status.

In High Sierra (1940), Raft was cast as Roy Earle, an ageing and weary bank robber. He refused the role, objecting not only to the character’s line of business, but also to the character’s death. But Bogart gave Earle a sympathetic code of ethics and although he was on the wrong side of the law, Bogie played him as a likeable anti-hero. High Sierra was an instant hit at the box-office. Raft also refused The Maltese Falcon (1941) when he was cast to play private investigator Sam Spade. The reasons for his refusal this time was that he considered it be an unimportant film; he also objected to the fact that it had been assigned to an untried director. The untried director was future Academy Award-winner John Huston. Huston would later state, “Everything was intended for George Raft at that time and I was not Raft’s greatest admirer. He was very much a Mafia type and liked to display it. He practically refused everything that was thrown at him. He really was very ignorant about movie roles. Poor devil threw away his film career.” The Maltese Falcon was an instant classic and remains so today. When George Raft watched the movie for the first time he quipped, “There but for the grace of me, go I.” Raft, the friend of mobsters, had now gained another reputation: “The man who made Bogart.” He made one more film at Warner Bros. and then paid Jack Warner $10,000 to buy out his own contract. Raft had decided that long-term studio contracts were not for him; instead he would freelance as an independent actor, selecting and negotiating each movie deal himself. George Raft would soon discover that his choice of movie roles did not necessarily correspond with what paying audiences wanted to see. His many miscalculations would ultimately precipitate his decline as a movie star. To be concluded...

was Each Dawn I Die (1939), in which he co-starred with his pal James Cagney, who had persuaded him to take the part. Cagney plays a crusading reporter about to expose a tie-in between the district attorney and the mob. He gets sent to prison on a trumped- up charge where he meets “Hood” Stacey (Raft), the tough king of the prison yard who, through nefarious methods, gets Cagney exonerated and the crooked DA arrested but is himself killed in the process. In addition to its major box-office success, the film set a standard for all subsequent prison movies. Raft’s next film, Invisible Stripes (1939), also had a prison theme – Raft plays an ex-con trying to go straight. During the production, Raft upset the director and rest of the cast by continually changing his character’s lines so that he would appear less hard-bitten. Events got so fractious on set that Jack Warner intervened by threatening to kill off Raft’s character much earlier in the film than was scripted. The production proceeded smoothly thereafter, but after the film wrapped, Raft would reject any other script that dealt with crime. Finally, he agreed on the trucking melodrama, They Drive by Night (1940), which also featured fourth-billed Humphrey Bogart. It proved to be Raft’s finest film throughout his brief tenure at Warner Bros.

Raft refused the starring roles in two motion pictures that are now considered Hollywood classics

The film that made Bogart a star, courtesy of George Raft refusing the role of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon

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