JOHNNY EAGER
(M.G.M.)
OR a good many _ years Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer have been trying hard to prove two things about Robert Taylor: (a)
that he has hair on his chest, (b) that he can act. In this cause he has already portrayed a Yank at Oxford, a prize-fighter, and a bad hombre of the Wild West, to mention only a few of the recognised varieties of hair-bearing he-men. And in this cause he now descends into the underworld of America, there to portray Johnny Eager, a gangster of a most noxious type-a crook who deludes the trusting: parole officer into believing that he is striving to be a good, honest, industrious citizen, while all the time he is the Evil Genius of a whole, city. He owns a luxury flat, a greyhound, racing track, various other shady gambling enterprises, and several women. He’s mighty tough is Mister Eager, but not quite tough enough. Lurv gets him in the end, in the person of Lana Turner, the lurvily daughter of Edward Arnold, the city prosecutor. (It would have to be the city prosecutor’s daughter, wouldn’t it?) And for her sweét sake, Johhny Eager eventually goes out and dies with his boots on, without having given the audience much chance to decide whether Robert Taylor (a) really has hair on his chest, or (b) really can act. But if there is still some doubt on these points, there should be none as to who is the real star of. the picture. This is a young man with the curious name of Van Heflin who has already made his presence felt in some other films. He will probably never be a star in his own right; he hasn’t the right sort of face, not as compared with Robert Taylor anyway. But as a scenestealer he would be a menace to a much greater actor than Taylor. In Johnny Eager his job is to be a drunken Boswell to Taylor’s racketeering Johnson. I imagine that the original intention of the producers was that he should provide a kind of comic relief, emphasising by his own sodden, philosophic weakness the toughness of his gangster chief, but as it has turned out, both Robert Taylor and Lana Turner are just the romantic (I won’t be so unkind as to say comic) relief to Mr. Van Heflin,
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https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/periodicals/NZLIST19420828.2.37.1.2
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 166, 28 August 1942, Page 16
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388JOHNNY EAGER New Zealand Listener, Volume 7, Issue 166, 28 August 1942, Page 16
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