Robert Taylor stars as Johnny Eager, a gangster who is out on parole and while he is running a top crime ring in the city, he is hiding it from the parole officials and he has them believing he is only a cab driver living at home with a mother and his younger sister.
Taylor is very good in the role of a ruthless man who has no idea what it is to feel anything for anyone. His life is somewhat tilted a bit when he meets Lisbeth Bard (Lana Turner). At their first meeting we all can see that she wants him and vice versa.
Eager is planning on opening a dog racing track, but John Benson Farrell (Edward Arnold) stands in his way. Farrell is a top man in town and Eager discovers that Bard is his daughter, so he sets Bard up by making her believe that she killed a man while defending Eager himself. This will keep everyone quite as nobody wants bad press.
The movie moves along very well and everyone in the movie is a fine tuned machine. There was a lot of backstory on this film and I'm not going into that there except to say I can understand easily why Taylor fell in love with Turner during this movie. Lana was 20 at the time and gorgeous as any woman has the right to be.
The rest of the cast includes Van Heflin, Robert Sterling, Patricia Dane, Barry Nelson, Paul Stewart, Glenda Farrell, and Diana Lewis.
Since this is film noir, everything comes to a bad end for every character, but damn, this is a GREAT movie and should be seen by every fan of film noir or just plain well made American films.
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