Gangster Joe Farrow kills a man after a game of craps. He offers gambler Marc Fury $50,000 if he will take the rap and stand trial. When Farrow tries to renege on the payment, Fury steals a ledger with information that could implicate Farrow. While being pursued, Fury slips the ledger into the possession of immigration social worker Lynn Warren.
Fury is acquitted, but immigration officers arrest him, take him to Ellis Island and threaten to deport him, as he is not a naturalized citizen. Fury finds Lynn and, although they are attracted to each other, she does not believe that his desire to remain in America is genuine.
Farrow's gunman seeks Fury but ultimately double-crosses his boss. When Fury offers the $50,000 to a family that desperately longs to remain in the country, Lynn begins to trust him.
The story, titled Mr. Whiskers, was purchased by RKO Pictures in 1947 and scheduled in 1948 as a vehicle for Victor Mature, a Twentieth Century-Fox player with a contractual obligation to star in one RKO film per year. However, the project was postponed to enable Mature to appear in Easy Living.[4] Mature refused the assignment and was suspended by Twentieth Century-Fox.[5]
In late 1949, the project was renamed Alias Mike Fury, later renamed again as Gambling House.[6] The script was rewritten and Mature relented.[7] Filming began in February 1950.[8]
Reception
In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic Bosley Crowther called the film "a run-of-the-mill melodrama" and wrote: "Your chances for solid satisfaction from this tale of a crook who goes straight after meeting a decent young lady are about as good as they would be from a fixed wheel. ... Put it down as claptrap and the performance of Mr. Mature as another demonstration of an actor doing the best he can with a bad role. Miss Moore is entirely incidental and William Bendix is mulishly mean as the tough and deceitful rascal who crosses up Mr. Mature. To say any more about it might tend to incriminate somebody."[2]
Critic Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times wrote: "The desire to avoid a straightaway melodrama on the part of those concerned may be commended, and their effort to inject a patriotic theme is good in principle. But actually these special values tend to defeat the melodramatic portion of the plot. The picture deals rather too sketchily with many tense and potentially suspenseful incidents, and does not carry power and conviction with it that normally belong to this type of production."[1]
References
12Schallert, Edwin (1951-02-24). "Gangland Story Essays Mixing in Patriotism". Los Angeles Times. p.11.
12Crowther, Bosley (1951-03-19). "The Screen in Review". The New York Times. p.23.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
