Hollywood enjoyed a revival of fact-based gangster biographies in the late 1950s, highlighted by the TV series The Untouchables (1959-1963) starring Robert Stack. The late entry The George Raft Story (1961) turns the formula inside out with the biopic of an actor-dancer who played gangsters in the movies and mixed with them in real life as well. Famed for tossing a coin in the Howard Hawks classic Scarface (1932), George Raft also claimed to have met the real Al Capone. Director Joseph F. Newman's film stars Ray Danton, who two years before had starred as the dancing hoodlum Legs Diamond. Although Danton bears little physical resemblance to Raft, he makes a fine dancing partner for his co-star Barrie Chase. The glamorous Margo Moore, Julie London, Barbara Nichols and Jayne Mansfield play other female companions in Raft's past, leading Newsweek to call the film a "rambling, all-starlet variety show spliced with mayhem." Mansfield's 'Lisa Lang' is meant to be Betty Grable, while Brad Dexter is Bugsy Siegel, and Neville Brand repeats his Untouchables impersonation of Al Capone. The movie implies that Raft fell on hard times after losing his Havana casino in the Castro revolution. He then ends up spinning a coin again, playing a funny mobster for Billy Wilder in the 1959 comedy Some Like it Hot.

By Glenn Erickson