Spin of a Coin

George raft was only 5 feet 7 ray Danton 6 feet. How was he chosen for this part?? Also raft was stocky. He must have been friends with the producers.

I was intrigued to learn about George Raft's life so I watched it.

I Googled him while I was watching. I learned about him turning down major Warner Brother roles and thought they could have focused on that a little more. It was quite sad that for an actor who did great gangster stuff from the 30's to the 40's that his last great movie was Some Like it Hot where he played a parody of himself and that he was relegated to a greeter at a Havana casino which went down south due to Castro's overthrow of the government.

Similar to Hogan's Heroes as far as the wrong era being used for the female actors, Why were behives and long flowing hair as well as sixties style dresses and shoes used? I was so focused on that that the movie was actually distracting.

That was the only thing I got out of the movie.

I doubt that George Raft will ever get his real story out there now that he's been gone since 1980. That he grew up in the gangster culture of the teens and Roaring Twenties in New York is certainly the case and the film reveals that he never drank. Probably a good thing for his liver that he did not indulge in the bathtub liquor during Prohibition. Maybe why he lived 87 years, the last 20 or so in some dire straits.

But after losing everything he made in Hollywood and after getting with barely a change of clothes from revolutionary Havana in 1959 this man needed a stake. So he sold the story of his life to B studio Allied Artists and the result was The George Raft Story.

Unfortunately too many people were still alive and names were changed to protect some not very innocent. Owney Madden, Meyer Lansky, Lucky Luciano from the gangster world, Norma Shearer, Betty Grable, Virginia Pine, Marlene Dietrich from Hollywood.

Most of all there was George Raft's wife Grayce Mulrooney. He might have married any or all of those women whom he was linked to at times, but he married Ms. Mulrooney back in the Twenties and as she was a Catholic she would not grant him a divorce. She died in 1971 and she's most important factor missing from this film.

Frank Gorshin plays the part of another man very much alive, Mack Gray. Check his credits on this site, you'll find a lot of him in Raft films, but others as well. Gray was Raft's retainer from New York days and he was a mysterious individual. His nickname was Killer and no one ever knew how much truth there was in that nickname.

Among the women in this film that were involved with Raft are Jayne Mansfield, Julie London, and Barrie Chase. Jayne Mansfield is supposed to be Betty Grable, but a good thing she didn't use her real name or Grable would have sued.

Ray Danton played Raft and not badly, but he reminded me more of Joe Mantegna playing George Raft in the Warren Beatty classic Bugsy. As for Ben Siegel as much as could be told was in this film. The relationship is far more clearly delineated in Beatty's film.

Another 20 years we might have gotten the unvarnished version of George Raft's life. This one is real loosely based and George needed the money.

This film has poor production values, and actors who are miscast. How could you possibly have the best Jimmy Cagney impersonator in history in this film and not have him cast as Jimmy Cagney? Raft was in a few films with Cagney and was from the same part of the city as Cagney on the lower east side. It would have been a natural for some interesting scenes. Most of the scenes (except the well-choreographed dancing numbers - the lead actor couldn't act, but he sure could dance) were predictable and overwrought, not to mention highly unlikely. Some of it was accurate, but most of the film is lost in Hollywood fantasy. Only worth viewing for research.

A somewhat cardboardy and flat performance from everyone. I would have rated it less than 5 if it hadn't been for the music. But the dancing and some of the singing was excellent - a lot of effort had been put into setting the routines into the correct period. So, good marks for that, but not for anything else. And what a corny inconclusive ending.