Review of Red Light

Meticulously groomed George Raft was a notoriously one-note actor, but his monotone worked harmoniously in the flattened acoustic of film noir. In Roy Del Ruth's Red Light -- an unusual "religioso" thriller -- he owns a trucking empire; his brother, a priest and army chaplain, has just been gunned down in a hotel room. The clue to the assassin's identity is supposedly scrawled in the room's Gideon Bible, which has gone missing. Raft enlists the aid of Virginia Mayo to track down both Bible and killer. But when they succeed, Raft's plans for revenge are thwarted by the Deity, in the form of a huge electrical sign during a pelting rainstorm, underscoring the movie's moral: "Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord." Raft's quest is jam-packed with every cinematic device that makes the noir cycle such delectable (if forbidden) fruit: flicked-away cigarette butts, rain-streaked windowpanes, grotesquely lit close-ups, San Francisco at its sleaziest. The film's heavies, Raymond Burr and Harry Morgan, win no congeniality awards; Burr's performance here may well be the nastiest in his impressive portfolio of thugs. Despite Dmitri Tiomkin's pietistic score, which lurches from the "Dies Irae" to the "Ave Maria" and back again, the spiritual side of the story seems clumsily overlaid, a late addition to the film's hard-core noir structure. And the title remains a puzzle. Is it meant as an injunction to "Stop" the cycle of bloodshed? A reference to the votive candle whose flame indicates that the Blessed Sacrament is in residence? Or to the electrocuting signage which ends the movie? No matter; it does little to dispel the deep, and deeply satisfying, thematic gloom.