Pay no attention to that map

One of the Noir Alley entries that Eddie Muller presented quite some time ago that I didn't get around to watching until just before it expired from the DVR, and then saved until much later to put up this post, is the 1947 film Riffraff. (Note that there are multiple films with this title, and the posters for the movie but not the title cards have the hyphenated title "Riff-Raff".)

The movie starts off with an interesting introductory sequence that doesn't have any of the main characters. A plane is flying somewhere over Latin America, except that it's a cargo plane carrying a couple of passengers of the sort who in another movie would be on one of those shady tramp steamers. The cargo door opens, and one of the passengers jumps out with a briefcase; the other passenger is no longer on the plane. The jumper winds up in Panama very close to the Canal Zone, since there are a whole lot of Americans soon to be around.

The man who jumped out of the plane is mysterious Charles Hasso (Marc Krah), and he goes to the office of fixer/factotum/sometimes detective Dan Hammer (Pat O'Brien), a man who knows the local area and knows how to get things done. Hasso's request is for Hammer to basically escort him around for two days and make certain nothing untoward happens to him. Meanwhile, he takes a map out of the briefcase and pins it to the room divider while Dan is on the other side of it changing into a fresh set of clothes!

Also getting in touch with Hammer is Gredson (Jerome Cowan), who works for an oil company based in Panama. Gredson was expecting the other man on that cargo plane to come to him with that map that Hasso pinned up in Hammer's office, as that map supposedly has the locations of some new oil discoveries in Peru to which nobody really has the concessions or something. And Gredson is willing to pay big bucks for that map.

Amazingly, nobody seems able to find that map despite it being in plain sight in Hammer's office! Among the people who have an interest in that map is Maxine (Anne Jeffreys), a nightclub singer who feigns romantic interest in Hammer while also trying to play the other side by working with Gredson. And then there's Molinar (Walter Slezak), who claims to be an artist but, because he's played by Walter Slezak, is obviously somebody with ulterior motives of his own and not exactly a protagonist. Worse, Hammer's office gets ransacked in a search for the map -- and nobody finds it!

For me, that's the big problem with Riffraff, unless you consider that the map is just another macguffin with the interactions between the characters being the main thing here. In my case, I just found it way too hard to believe that everybody could be this stupid that they couldn't find that map. There's also the addition of Percy Kilbride playing Hammer's assistant/driver. I think he's supposed to be a bit of comic relief, but his is the sort of character who isn't going to be to everybody's taste.

Still, Riffraff is a visually stylish movie at times, which shouldn't be a surprise since director Ted Tetzlaff had started as a cinematographer. It's just that that visual style is most evident in the opening and the story rather fizzles out.