I'm getting near to the end of writing up reviews of the movies I recorded when George Raft was TCM's Star of the Month back at the beginning of 2025. This time, it's a film from the beginning of his descent into the realm of B movies: Johnny Angel. It will be on TCM tomorrow, January 13, at 11:30 AM.
Raft actually does play a character named Johnny Angel, and that seems to be the character's real name. Johnny is in the merchant marine, captaining a ship for the Gunderson Line run my George Gustafson (Marvin Miller) out of New Orleans during World War II. Johnny's boat plies the Gulf of Mexico, and as the film opens he and his crew spot another ship that appears to be adrift in the fog. Johnny boards it and finds that it was the ship that his father, also a ship's captain for the Gustafson Line, captained, except that there's nobody left on board, which is an obvious mystery.
Johnny tows his father's boat back to New Orleans, where we find that the shipping line isn't in as good shape as one might have hoped for. George is the latest in a line of Gustafsons, but he's got a wife Lilah (Claire Trevor) who seems to have married him for his money. The fact that Lilah used to be in a relationship with Johhny complicates matters. That, and a secretary Miss Drumm (Margaret Wycherly) who was George's governess back in the day and still seems to have a lot of influence. None of the three have any clue about what might have happened to Johnny's dad; worse, they don't much seem to care.
So Johnny goes back about his father's ship, which is where he finds a woman's shoe and a newspaper that looks like it was printed back in France. So with the help of cabbie Celestial (Hoagy Carmichael), Johnny goes looking for anybody who might have knowledge about a French woman who would likely be new to New Orleans. The fact that there's a war on would at least explain why such a woman would be seeking illicit passage aboard a cargo ship like the ones the Angel father and son captained.
Johnny and Celestial go to the various clubs and other spots where someone new in town might go to look for a cheap place to sleep and get a starter job, so you know they're eventually going to find a woman who might just be the one who was aboard Dad's boat. They do indeed find such a woman, Paulette (Signe Hasso), and she has a story to tell that would be incredibly improbable in real life, but par for the course in a Hollywood movie. Apparently she and her father were transporting Free French gold across the Atlantic for safekeeping, when some people who somehow learned of this come aboard the boat, killing everyone but Paulette who was able to hide or something. (Why there was no blood on the boat is a good question.) So Paulette is out to find that gold, and the people who took it. Johnny, for his part, is willing to help Paulette. But Mr. Gustafson puts a crimp in those plans. Is he in on the heist, or just stupid?
For me, the problem with Johnny Angel is that it had a plot that was too complex for its own good, especially in a B movie like this. George Raft is also not exactly the most charismatic romantic leading man out there. Still, everybody tries, and the movie is not uninteresting if at the same time not particularly great. Johnny Angel is enjoyable enough for a rainy day, but once again it's one of those movies where there are good reasons why it's not very well remembered 80 years on.
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