For a time in the 1930s he was one of the highest-paid stars in Hollywood, but by the 1950s his star was on the decline, thanks to a history of clashing with studio bosses, poor choices (he famously passed on two films from 1941, High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon, films that launched Humphrey Bogart into movie stardom) and limited range. So when he was offered a three picture deal with Lippert Pictures, an independent production house that delivered films that were bigger and more ambitious than B movies but lacked the star power and budgets of studio productions, he signed on for $25,000 a picture plus 25% of the profits.
Loan Shark (1952) was the first of these pictures. Raft was over 50, past his prime as a leading man but still able to leverage his gravel voice, granite face, clipped delivery and stiffness that would explode into sudden action in tough guy roles. With Raft attached to the film, Lippert gave the film a $250,000 budget, bigger than most of the studio's productions. The film was shot in early 1952 on the RKO Pathe lot with director Seymour Friedman (a veteran of B movies) at the helm and cinematographer Joseph Biroc (who photographed Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life from 1946 and decades later won an Oscar for shooting 1974's The Towering Inferno) behind the camera.
Gail Russell was originally cast in the role of Ann Nelson, the film's love interest, but the actress struggled with alcoholism, an issue that ultimately derailed her career. She was replaced by Dorothy Hart just before production began. Two veteran character actors were cast in major supporting roles. Paul Stewart, a veteran of Orson Welles' Mercury Players (he made a memorable big screen debut in 1941 as Raymond the butler in Citizen Kane) whose husky voice and dark features gave him steady work playing gangsters and villains, plays the debt collector Lou Donelli. And John Hoyt, who played everything from cops and crooks to army officers and politicians, appears as Lou's boss. Hoyt's name may not be familiar but his lean face may be familiar to classic movie fans as the bitter millionaire in the 1951 science fiction classic When Worlds Collide and the disciplinarian principal in 1955's Blackboard Jungle, and as the crusty but lovable Grandpa Stanley on the sitcom Gimme a Break!. And note the presence of Russell Johnson in a small but vital role as a tire plant foreman with a side hustle. Russell kept busy with small roles in dozens of movies and scores of TV shows but a generation of TV viewers know him as The Professor in the sitcom Gilligan's Island.
The film opens with a dynamic pre-credits sequence: a walk down a dark street, a man shadowed by a pair of threatening figures, and a brutal attack in an alley that Friedman punctuates with an optical effect that explodes from the center of the screen, a sign that this was more ambitious than the standard Lippert production. "The director, Seymour Friedman, manages to pace the proceedings at a reasonable clip," noted the film review in The New York Times signed "H.H.T.," which also offered backhanded praise for the star. "For once, Mr. Raft's tight-lipped suavity seems perfectly in order..." Other reviews were similarly positive but guarded. For whatever success it enjoyed, Raft didn't see any of his 25% participation. The film never showed a profit, at least not on paper.
Sources:
George Raft: The Man Who Would be Bogart, Stone Wallace. BearManor Media, 2008.
"Raft Takes Side of Law and Order," H.H.T. The New York Times, May 12, 1952.
AFI Catalog of Feature Films
IMDb
By Sean Axmaker
