Peereddi
I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.
Kidskycom
It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.
Cheryl
A clunky actioner with a handful of cool moments.
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
utgard14
Parolee John Eager (Robert Taylor) has everybody fooled that he's gone straight and is trying to make an honest living as a taxi driver. In reality, Eager hasn't given up his criminal life at all. He's still a racketeer and he's working to open up a new dog track but is finding opposition from a vigilant district attorney (Edward Arnold). Eager starts dating pretty society girl Lisbeth (Lana Turner). When he finds out she's the stepdaughter of the D.A., he tries to use his relationship with Lisbeth as leverage against her stepfather.Glossy crime drama from MGM with some film noir touches. Love the dialogue and the cast is terrific. This is one of my favorite Robert Taylor performances. Far more enjoyable to me than all of those sappy romantic melodramas from the '30s. Edward Arnold, of course, can do no wrong. Lana Turner looks gorgeous (no surprise) and does fine in a role that requires little from her but to be a naive lovestruck young woman. Van Heflin plays Taylor's cynical alcoholic friend who has many of the movie's best lines. He's the scene stealer in this, by the way, and deservedly won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar. As with any old movie where there's a close male friendship, many reviewers read into it things that may or may not have been intended. Watch it and decide for yourself. The rest of the cast is full of great actors. Just take a gander at the cast list for this and you'll see how much talent was involved here. It's really a quality movie with a solid script, good characters, and a powerful ending.
Tad Pole
. . . can melt the basest Beast, and JOHNNY EAGER proves to be no exception to this rule. As Johnny fades from view at the end of his namesake movie, you can almost hear him echoing the last whine of Dorothy Gale's nemesis (the Wicked Witch of the West), with something along the lines of, "I'm melting, melting - - who would think a pretty young thing like Lana Turner could destroy all my wonderful wickedness?!" Who indeed. Unlike, say, Ted Bundy, Johnny is not hung up on women. He's an equal opportunity sociopath, who never got kissed by a grandmother of his he wouldn't sell out for the least little advantage. He's akin to a sadistic rich kid playing with six dozen Ken and Barbie dolls, blowing up one or eight with firecrackers just for "the fun of it." Johnny's Eager to add Lana to his endless trail of discarded pawns, from force of habit. But, unlike all his past victims, she doesn't have the decency to stifle her tears. Johnny goes soft, and it ain't a pretty sight!
trimmerb1234
Handsome, quick on his feet and quicker on the draw gangster Johnny Eager (Taylor) meets the hottest-of-hot young Hollywood dames, Lana Turner, here the District Attorney's daughter. Johnny needs a betting licence from the D.A. but with Johnny's record it ain't gonna happen. As always Johnny's got an angle - this time it ain't pretty at all. But has Johnny run into an acquaintance he ain't seen for a long long while: his conscience? Or is it just his pal (Van Heflin) who's started yapping like some bible-puncher making him on edge? Johnny slugs him to shut him up but his pal still wont stop yapping. Or is it his conscience that's screwing things up? Maybe he just ain't got one? Maybe.This movie motors like a hot rod with the pedal to the metal - with three people doing the steering! It sure is going fast but for sure it ain't going far. Johnny's had his crashes before but this time is different. This time there ain't gonna be too many survivors.Robert Taylor and Lana Turner were never better - they were both young and hot and riding in this souped-up racer of a movie. Yet oddly it was Van Heflin who got the Oscar for his role as the drunken, maudlin muttering voice of conscience, a role he was to make his own and reprised from then on. Clearly, the studio understood that the public of the day was not ready for a raw amoral sociopath as a hero and needed the authorial moral commentary that the Van Heflin character provided to licence their lascivious enjoyment. Today the Van Heflin character appears so insufferable that the public would instead be more likely to be willing Johnny to shoot him - and it would have been Robert Taylor who received the Oscar.
