Red Light

Army Chaplain Slain!

Red Light is directed by Roy Del Ruth and adapted to screenplay by George Callahan from the story This Guy Gideon written by Don Barry. It stars George Raft, Virginia Mayo, Raymond Burr, Harry Morgan and Gene Lockhart. Music is by Dimitri Tiomkin and cinematography by Bert Glennon.

Something of an oddity, Red Light finds George Raft up to his neck in religion, revenge and a smouldering Virginia Mayo. After his brother, a chaplain, is murdered, he sets off to find the killer, whom can be identified by a message scrawled in a Gideon Bible. Find the Bible, find the killer.

It is brought into the film noir sphere of things via Glennons photography, which kicks in at the hour mark and runs concurrent with the murky ...

This is quite an intriguing crime noir, with George Raft as the owner of a trucking company out to avenge the murder of his brother - a priest. We know from the start who is responsible for the crime, so the film provides us with a front row seat as he sets about tracking down the culprit. It's quite a thoughtful story, a bit more sophisticated that your run of the mill vengeance tale. Raft plays his part well enough (he is a bit wooden at times), as do Virginia Mayo and Raymond Burr helping to build up quite a decent degree of tension, and when Raft ("Torno") does eventually discover what happened that night, he must reconcile the last wishes of his brother with his own visceral desire for revenge... The staging is a little too theatrical,...