evanston_dad I had kind of a "meh" reaction to this noirish drama from 1942. Robert Taylor and Lana Turner are roguish and fetching, respectively, but Mervyn LeRoy, despite his prolific list of credits, was a pretty hopelessly boring director, and nothing about this film stands out. It's fine, but there's not much about it to motivate a modern-day audience to revisit it.It would probably be a mere blip in cinema history if not for the fact that it won Van Heflin a Best Supporting Actor Oscar as Taylor's alcoholic and lachrymose best friend. He is pretty good, but not good enough to make the film around him worth watching.There are about a million other movies I would recommend before settling down to this one.Grade: C

st-shot Robert Taylor doesn't ace every scene but he gives a more than credible performance as Johnny Eager, an inventive pragmatic and violent when called for gangster trying to open a legit dog track from behind the scenes. In order to avoid being a parole violator Eager pretends to drive a cab while he masterminds the track deal paying off cops and officials to smooth things. Some officials can't be bought however and a judge (Edward Arnold) with a deep seeded resentment of Eager whom he refers to as "Thief" and humiliates blocks his license. The coldly practical Eager circumvents the problem by compromising the judge's daughter (Lana Turner) but loses his balance on the tightrope he's walking when he falls hard for her dame.Eager has a crisper look than most noirs and director Mervyn LeRoy deftly handles the storyline and avoids run of the mill by injecting minor but telling incidentals that indicate Johnny's slow transformation. Suspense scenes are well edited and mise en scene is busy and filled with pertinent detail.While Bogart might seem an apt choice to play Eager I doubt he could have played it with the same nervous authoritative energy or insecurity Taylor does here. Most of all he lacks Taylor's good looks which are crucial to romancing Lana Turner. The glamorous Ms. Turner is at first a little hard to believe as a student studying social work but she does acquit herself well in some powerfully dramatic scenes with Taylor. Paul Stewart, Glenda Farrell and Edward Arnold chip in fine supporting performances while Van Heflin delivers a magnificent one. Heflin as Eager's alcoholic sidekick and pickled conscience is not only effectively moving but also lends a droll sense of wit to the film with his sardonic observations.

Robert J. Maxwell Robert Taylor is Johnny Eager, one of several Johnnies with strange last names to come out of Hollywood during the 1940s -- Johnny Apollo, Johnny O'Clock, Johnny Belinda, Johnny Logical Positivist, Johnny Be Good, and what not. Of course Taylor has small room for complaint when it comes to names. He was born Spangler Arlington Borough in Nebraska. In this film he's on parole, see, and pretends to be nothing more than your honest cab driver but he really runs some kind of underhanded business involving dog racing. He uses everybody around him, a real nasty guy. The only trustworthy friend he has is the alcoholic Van Heflin. Then Taylor meets and falls for a real classy dame, Lana Turner, born Julia Mildred Turner in Wallace, Idaho, navel of the universe.She's the daughter of the morally upright and thoroughly obnoxious DA, Edward Arnold, who has sent Taylor up the river once and wants nothing more than to find an excuse to do it again. Arnold's character's name is O'Hara but, though he looks a little Irish, he looks a lot more like a German burgher, which is not surprising. He was born Gunther Schneider in New York. Okay. End of names. I don't know what got into me but I feel a lot better now.Taylor really has the hots for Lana Turner and it doesn't come as a shock. She has the beauty and sensuality of a perfectly mature pinot blanc grape, all ready to pop when squeezed. But she's a little stand-offish with Taylor, though obviously attracted to him, so Taylor arranges a phony scene in which she seems to murder someone and he saves her from her mock crime. This puts her in a dependent position and it also gives him a bit of leverage with her father so that illegal activities can be carried on apace. Two birds with one gun. It takes Van Heflin the entire movie to convince Taylor that he's a moral pustule, and in the end Taylor gives it all up for the sake of Lana Turner and his own self esteem.Taylor and Turner were both MGM products and the studio certainly proved its loyalty. Neither could act very well and both had short peaks in their popularity arc, but both kept soldiering on in MGM's movies, aging but still useful in that they didn't get in the way of the scenery. Taylor was a reasonably nice guy, personally if not politically, but as he grew older his features became coarser and he was handed roles that were increasingly villainous and sometimes downright sadistic, as in "Westward the Women," in which he seems to relish punishing his female charges with a bull whip. Turner's career faded less dramatically.The two characters in this film are obviously from different socioeconomic strata. Van Heflin quotes Richard III to him. And aptly too: "I can smile, and while I smile, can cut your heart out with an ax." Turner quotes Cyrano de Bergerac of whom Taylor says, "That don't go with me. I don't care how ugly a guy is if he don't go all the way." Everybody quotes Shakespeare and Rostand and all those other high-falutin' Greeks and Taylor, a total numbskull, keeps coming up with ripostes like, "Ahh, you're going' daffy." The most interesting character, although not the most original, is Van Heflin's Jeff. What's he doing here anyway? He keeps hanging around Robert Taylor, guzzling whiskey and making moon eyes at his boss. Of course the function of the character is to provide Taylor with a gently reproving superego. "Gee, Johnny, what'd you have to clip her in the mug for?" But the audience already knows that Taylor is possessed by terpitude, a snake. An equally compelling motive for his being here is that he's got a crush on Taylor -- and maybe vice versa.Not a bad flick. Mervyn LeRoy, of "Little Caesar", was a decent director. It's just not very original, not nearly as tough as it sounds or as unpredictable or penetrating as was probably hoped.

sandra small The celebrated German philosopher Immanual Kant's premise of theory was that there is no originality, because we are influenced by what we experience. In that case Johnny Eager (1942)is a clichéd gangster film. But the clichéd roles give way to nuanced characters, which have originality within their various slants of their respective stereotypes. Director Leroy achieves this by adding to the clichés of sharp suited mobsters and their dolls anomalies as in the emotional, erudite gangster with ethics.A classic stereotype, (well observed and researched by the production team) is that of Lana Turner's character; Lizbeth Bard. She is the clichéd sociology student. That is she is a middle class naive ingénue, whose fascination with her subject matter gets her in too deep. This role gave Turner credibility as an actor! Likewise, the film gave Taylor the credibility he deserved as an actor of dimensions. His caricature of the solipsistic gangster gave him an edge which usurped his 'pretty boy' image. Nevertheless Taylor's Johnny Eager seems to have a sense of his beauty that has the women running to him. One example is the scene when the women run to serve him at the desk near the start of the film. This begs the question of was Johnny Eager's looks that had the women eating out of his hand? or was it his 'gangster' image that attracted them? Could Eager have had the women falling for him with just looks alone? His character wouldn't be half as sexy in the role of Bard's other love interest, that of the sweet, well intentioned good -guy as in Robert Sterling's character; Jimmy Courtney.The other stand out performance (deserved of his Oscar) is that of Van Heflin playing the complex ,sesquipedalian and polymath, Jeff Hartnett. He is the cerebral side kick of Eager. Like the women, he has got in too deep with Eager because of his homo erotic attraction to the latter.Mention should also go to the excellent turns by Edward Arnald as the over protective Dad, who has come from nothing,making it as a respectable lawyer, with ambitions for his daughter to marry a wealthy socialite with a good name. His over protectiveness as Bard's Dad gives way to a subtext of incest. This has Hartnett (Heflin) mention the famous psychologist Freud.Also outstanding in this film is the clever script, which is evidently well researched, as in the example of the naive sociology student. The direction of the film is a credit to Mervyn LeRoy who portrays the clichéd caricatures of the characters to almost perfection. . The film takes allot of twists and turns, which defines it as 'film noir'.This was the film that altered the career of Robert Taylor, transforming him from a 'pretty boy' film star to a credible actor. It definitely is worth seeing.