Years before he was Jack Webb's slightly sardonic sidekick on "Dragnet", Harry Morgan had a solid film career, playing bad guys for the most part in various noirs and dramas. A while back I remarked on Morgan's presence in films of that time (late 40s to mid-50s), saying that if you saw his name in the credits, you knew there was gonna be trouble. As mild as he was on "Dragnet", Harry Morgan specialised in playing troublemakers in his younger days. In tonight's movie, "Red Light"(1949), starring George Raft and Virginia Mayo, he plays an ex-con just out of San Quentin. But as hardened as Morgan is, he pales in viciousness to his cell mate Raymond Burr. As bad as Morgan's characters were in films of the era, Burr's were even worse. In total contrast to his most famous role (once again on TV) as the righteous lawyer "Perry Mason", Burr had a steady career in movies prior to working in television. And if you think Harry Morgan was trouble, in the various noirs he made, Raymond Burr was downright psycho in his. Not explosively psycho like a Richard Widmark, but cold blooded and capable of anything.
Put Harry Morgan and Raymond Burr in the same cell in San Quentin, and you've got a big time recipe for revenge. Here's the deal - George Raft owns a trucking company in San Francisco. Burr had been his accountant, but embezzled a truckload of money (pun intended), so Raft had him sent to prison. As the movie opens, he's talking to his cellmate Morgan, who's due to be released that day. Burr wants payback for being sent to the slammer, so he decides to take it out on Raft by going after Raft's brother, an Army Chaplain who's been in the news for his five year stint in the Pacific Theater, ministering to front line Marines. The newspaper says the chaplain has returned home. Burr reads the headline, and offers Harry Morgan part of the money he stole if Morgan will kill the chaplain - Raft's brother - when he gets out of The Joint.
Do you think Harry Morgan agrees? Of course he does! He would not have been hired for the role had he declined. As an aside, consider an analogy to another actor, say......Elijah Cook Jr. You'd know him if you saw him. In his case, he always played either A Chiseler or A Squealer, so if you saw his name in the credits, you knew he was gonna rat someone out, but only after trying to Chisel the coppers first. So it's the same deal with Harry Morgan. In film noirs (and even some regular dramas), he was incapable of Not Doing Bad.
I mean, look......when you've got a movie where George Raft is the good guy, you know that, in Morgan and Raymond Burr, you've got some seriously bad hombres.
So, briefly - and I'll get to the point now - the Chaplain does get killed, by Morgan, but it happens in a darkened hotel room, so it's not a thousand percent clear who did it. George Raft arrives, discovers his brother near death, and asks him to name the culprit.
The brother's last words are, "It's......written in the Bible, Johnny".
This leads Raft on a search for the Gideon's Bible that was taken out of his brother's room on the night of the murder, because he assumes that the name of the killer in written inside.
Raft collars a hotel bellhop for information, and discovers that Virginia Mayo was the next person to rent the room where the chaplain died. After giving her the strong arm, Raft discovers she had nothing to do with it, and pays her to assist him in his search for the killer, which will take them to different cities including Reno, Nevada. The police, headed up by our pal Barton MacLane, will trail them throughout. MacLane wants Raft to leave it alone, and "let us handle it". And this brings us to an interesting religious subcontext, which is brought to the forefront by film's end. Keeping in mind that his brother is a chaplain, and that Raft's character is a Catholic himself (who donates to his church), Raft has to come to the realisation that it is not for him to decide the fate of the killers. The cops have already tried persuading him of this, but he's loaded with money and goes his own way. The theme continues as he tries to locate the missing bible, and the movie takes on a profound spiritual turn involving some very unique characters, before resuming the original plot and concluding to a grim, hard boiled finish.
All in all, a very good one for a medium budget crime flick. Call it a mix of traditional noir with a touch of William Dieterle thrown in on the spiritual part. "Red Light" was directed by Roy Del Ruth, whom I think we've seen at the helm before, in a picture or two. He's got a memorable name, but I'll have to look him up to be sure. ////
Meanwhile, tonight is my last night at home until mid-January. Tomorrow morn I will be back at Pearl's for my next cycle, and I shall write to you from there. This evening I finally finished a book I have been working on all year, Book One of R.A. Schwaller de Lubicz' "The Temple of Man", a philosophical study of the architecture of the temple of Luxor in Egypt as it relates to something called the anthropocosmos of the Universe. I obtained this book, which comprises two volumes, after reading one of Dr. Joseph Farrell's far more accessible works, probably "Grid of the Gods". Anyway, in that book Dr. Joe mentioned Schwaller, so I thought I'd better read him too. Schwaller's book was expensive, but I bought it and started in.........
It turned out to be The Most Obtuse Book Ever Written, at least that I've read, and I'm not counting hard-to-understand mathematical tomes and things like that, I'm taking about nearly impenetrable obtuseness.
But I finished it, Book One at least. Took me a whole year, but I did it, in between a lot of other books, and I've still got Book Two to go. Give Schwaller a shot, if you are so inclined. What isn't clear in his verbiage, you will absorb by osmosis. ////
See you tomorrow, from Pearl's. Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox :):)
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