NR | 1h 18m | Crime, Drama, Thriller | 1953
In the 1930s, George Raft was one of Hollywood’s major tough guys—the coin-flipping gangster in “Scarface” (1932). He was a leading man who could carry a studio picture on his name alone. By the end of the 1940s, the better jobs had dried up for him. Raft kept working anyway, moving into lower-budget movies and European productions.
In 1953, Raft summed up his situation with considerably less sentimentality than any critic could manage: “As far as pictures are concerned, I’m dead.” He kept appearing in movies for years, including “Some Like It Hot” (1959), though by then his days as a major leading man were history.
“I’ll Get You” (1953, released in the UK in 1952 as “Escape Route”) catches him on that inevitable downward trajectory. Raft plays an American investigating the disappearance of scientists in Britain during the early Cold War.
The production is smaller than the movies that built his reputation, although Raft still carries himself like somebody who expects the camera to know exactly who he is. Even at this later point in his career, he still has the clipped delivery, hard face, and economical way of moving where a slight turn of his head can do most of the work.
Scientists Vanish
Steve Rossi (Raft) arrives at London Airport and promptly makes himself a problem for Scotland Yard by slipping past immigration and disappearing into the city. He’s looking for Michael Grand (Clifford Evans). Grand is tied to a group believed to be kidnapping Western scientists and shipping them off to the dastardly communists behind the Iron Curtain.
Rossi starts working his way through some dodgy London contacts. The police circulate his photograph and try to figure out who he is and why he vanished the moment he touched down.
Rossi’s search eventually leads him to Joan Miller (Sally Gray); she purports to be Grand’s secretary but might just know more than she first lets on. From there, the two begin closing in on Grand, while Rossi tries to keep his cover intact as Scotland Yard continues hunting for him. It’s a murky set of circumstances, especially when the man trying to infiltrate a spy ring has his face plastered all over newspapers throughout London.
Raft Still Knows the Job
Raft’s Rossi moves through the picture like a man who’s been doing this sort of dangerous work for years. Gray’s Joan Miller makes an agreeable partner for Rossi and gets some of the movie’s livelier exchanges. Evans makes Grand a respectable adversary without morphing him into a cape-twirling or feline-petting spy villain.
Gray retired from films after this picture, which gives this movie another accidental end-of-an-era connection. While Raft was watching his leading-man career dwindle, Gray simply left the business after nearly two decades on screen.
The narrative spends a little too much time passing around names, addresses, and information; the middle of the picture can start feeling like somebody reading from an unusually complicated phone book. The subsequent more action-packed bits finally give Raft something physical to do, sending the picture out with some needed movement.
For a guy who would soon declare himself “dead” as far as pictures were concerned, Raft looks pretty lively here. “I’ll Get You” comes from the period when Hollywood had mostly moved on from him, yet there’s no whiff of a man sleepwalking through unwanted assignments in this British film.
He gives Rossi the same Raft coolness and treats the material seriously, even when the movie itself starts verging on an exercise in bookkeeping.
This may be minor George Raft, but his admirable performance is also a good reminder that fading careers and fading performers aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes the marquee gets smaller before the actor does.
“I’ll Get You” is available on GanJingWorld.
‘I’ll Get You’
Director: Seymour Friedman
Starring: George Raft, Sally Gray, Clifford Evans
Not Rated
Running time: 1 hour, 18 minutes
Release Date: Jan. 16, 1953
Rated: 3 1/2 stars out of 5
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