THE BIG SHOT

US, 1942, 82 minutes, Black and white.
Humphrey Bogart, Irene Manning, Richard Travis, Donald Crisp, Stanley Ridges, Henry Hull, Arthur Kennedy, Susan Peters, Howard de Silva.
Directed by Lewis Seiler.

The Big Shot is a routine Humphrey Bogart programmer. It would not be high on the list of must-see Bogart films. This is surprising insofar as it was made around the time of High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon and soon before Casablanca.

The film is a brief gangster thriller reminiscent of so many of Warner Brothers' films in the 30s. The city locations are familiar, the inner city black and white photography, the cafes, the bars, the rich apartments. The action sequences are as predicted. Nevertheless they are, in their Warner Brothers way, solid Hollywood entertainment.

The film is in the form of a flashback. Bogart is a dying criminal - called Duke. As he is about to die, he remembers the incidents in which he was embroiled. As a multi-convicted criminal, he ran the risk of life imprisonment by embarking on a new robbery. He was goaded into it by the taunts of former co-gangsters and the patronage of a shady lawyer. However, his former girlfriend (played by Irene Manning) has married the lawyer. She tries to persuade him not to go to the robbery. He doesn't - she is with him and is seen by one of the jealous gangsters. When the case comes to court (Bogart has been identified by an old lady knocked down in the attempted robbery) he is brought to court. The cab driver who gave him an alibi is brought in and his testimony proved to be false - with the manipulation of the lawyer. The young man toes to prison. (He is played by Travis, he is a sympathetic character, as is his girlfriend, Susan Peters.)

Duke eventually dies, the lawyer is exposed, his wife killed. Typical 40s Hollywood poetic justice.

This is the kind of material that Bogart did so well - almost without trying. Not by any means an important film or a great one, but historically interesting.