Johnny Eager is a gangster melodrama starring Robert Taylor as the eponymous Eager and Lana Turner as his femme fatale, Lisbeth Bard.\u00a0 Van Heflin plays Jeff Hartnett, Johnny\u2019s alcoholic and intellectual side kick.\u00a0 And to round out the major players Edward Arnold is John Farrell, a prosecutor and Lisbeth\u2019s step-father.<\/p>\n
(Spoiler Alert \u2013 Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)<\/strong><\/p>\n When we first meet Johnny, he is cab driver arriving at his parole officer\u2019s office to report on his reformed life.\u00a0 Johnny was sent to prison for a laundry list of crimes associated with his status as a crime boss.\u00a0 There he meets Lisbeth as a student studying criminology or sociology or some such nonsense.\u00a0 After Johnny leaves the office, he heads to a dog track where supposedly his boss works.\u00a0 But what we discover is that the cab is just a front and Johnny is still a crime boss.\u00a0 He\u2019s working to get his dog track licensed and up and running so that he can start bringing in millions in legal betting.<\/p>\n By a strange set of circumstances Lisbeth ends up seeing through his disguise and starts a romance with her new criminal boyfriend.\u00a0 While the romance is blossoming, we also get to see Johnny\u2019s business style.\u00a0 He portrays a likeable persona to his gang members and even the general public but when anyone crosses him, even old friends, he exhibits complete ruthlessness.\u00a0 And it\u2019s during these moments that Jeff acts as a mocking but honest mirror for Johnny to know his own evil.<\/p>\n As the central device of the story, Johnny decides to use Lisbeth\u2019s love for him to force John Farrell to allow his dog track to open.\u00a0 Johnny sets up a phony attack on himself by one of his thugs and during the fight Lisbeth tries to save Johnny from being knifed by picking up a gun and shooting the thug.\u00a0 Johnny convinces her that she has killed the man.\u00a0 Actually, the gun was loaded with blanks.\u00a0 Lisbeth is devastated to think she has killed a man and stops eating and sleeping.\u00a0 Johnny takes advantage of the situation to blackmail Farrell into licensing the dog track.<\/p>\n But when Johnny realizes that he has destroyed Lisbeth\u2019s life he decides to do the right thing.\u00a0 He proves to Lisbeth that the man she thinks she\u2019s killed is alive and further he pushes Lisbeth into the arms of her old boyfriend who has been trying to save her from Johnny.<\/p>\n And of course, all the machinations he performs to prove that the thug is still alive ends up sparking a gun battle between Johnny and his evil associates.\u00a0 The movie ends with Johnny killing his enemies but also being shot up by them and then finished off by a policeman coming on the scene.<\/p>\n This not a great movie.\u00a0 This is not even a great gangster movie.\u00a0 But it is entertaining.\u00a0 And that is almost entirely based on Robert Taylor\u2019s performance.\u00a0 He provides an engaging personality as the likeable devil.\u00a0 We know that Johnny is evil but he is smart, charming and most of the evil he does is directed at other denizens of the underworld.\u00a0 In a way, the worst part of the movie is his final conversion to a caring human being. In its day the critics enjoyed Van Heflin\u2019s character for his witty irony.\u00a0 I thought he was annoying.\u00a0 I\u2019ll recommend this movie to fans of 1940\u2019s gangster movies who don\u2019t mind a heavy handed \u201ccrime doesn\u2019t pay\u201d message at the end.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Johnny Eager is a gangster melodrama starring Robert Taylor as the eponymous Eager and Lana Turner as his femme fatale, Lisbeth Bard.\u00a0 Van Heflin plays<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n