A Dangerous Profession: With friends like these …

You know …  A Dangerous Profession wouldn’t have been so dangerous had tough guy George Raft left well enough alone and hadn’t poked his nose into business he had no business poking his nose into.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand … scene!

That’s what I learned from this melodrama that was rather mellow on the drama and stylistically convoluted to boot. Of course, it’s not quite as easy as all that. There’s plenty more to the story … but if you boil it all down, that was pretty much the gist of the matter.

Oh, you betcha … there was a dame involved (Ella Raines as Lucy Beckett, hubba-hubba). She was the reason Vince Kane (Raft) gets involved in all the hoo-ha in the first place. Kane — who was a cop before he got into the “high profile” career as bondsman — gets invested in former flame Mrs. Beckett’s affairs when her husband is nabbed on embezzlement charges. Once sprung from the clink on bond (1/3 of which is courtesy of Kane, his business’s coin and his ulterior motives) Mr. Beckett ends up getting himself snuffed, in turn giving the missus one of the best presents he could possibly afford her: Instant marriage relief.

And so begins this 1949 black & white yawner which goes on to prove why the lucrative bail bond business hasn’t been featured in more plots since the film noir days … because it’s boring as hell.

What I stated above in the first line is true: Had Kane not been a former police officer with his detectivish curiosities still firmly in place (not to mention the need to get caught in womanly web weaving), this tale would not have been worth telling. And even then the story is rather the jumbled mess, confusing and sometimes difficult to follow.

But it still hovers over the bright side of the good/bad measuring standard, especially if you’re a fan of the genre. All the usual trappings of the period are firmly in place, even if the film’s by-line (“Killers Are His Clients!”) reveals the killers to be more lackluster than fiendish.

Part of the fun of this piece was seeing Jim Backus (Mr. Magoo, Thurston Howell III) as Police Lt. Nick Ferrone, hard-boiled and by-the-book. He even did the voice-over intro at the start of the film with unintentional comedic style (quotation above). Other notables include Pat O’Brien as Kane’s bond partner Joe Farley and a yummy Betty Underwood.

Film noir buffs will dig A Dangerous Profession, part of the Warner Archive Collection of recent releases. It’s made available with a new remaster which is efficient, nice and clean. No extras mar the DVD, nothing but a straight-outta-Compton standard … about bail bondsmen.

(Hokay … so maybe it’s not straight out of Compton — it’s actually set in Los Angeles. Get off me, ya mook.)

This review was based on a retail copy of A Dangerous Profession provided to CliqueClack by the Warner Archive Collection.