“Till I run up against you, Nazi was just a word in the newspapers to me. Now it’s another way to spell cockroach. Well, this place needs cleaning up, and for the next two minutes, I’m a one-man Board Of Health.”
Lucky (Ladd) runs a New York crime gang. He’s dealing with two very big problems. His second, Slip Moran (Leonard) is trying to have him killed, so he employs lookalikes and doesn’t let on to Slip that he’s wise to his efforts. Also, his number has come up, but it’s not because of Slip. It’s WWII calling, and he’s trying to dodge the draft. His lawyer tries one scam after another, but nothing is working. He even hires an old lady, Ma (Paige) to pose as his dependent mother but blows the scam when he gives a grand a week as his payments to her. There’s nothing to be done. Lucky is going into the army, and Slip is going to be taking over the mob.
Once in the army, Lucky becomes a goof-off. He shirks his duties and hides out in the canteen most of the time. There he meets Jill Evans (Walker), who turns him in as AWOL when he flirts a little too much. That plants Lucky in lockup, where he decides to escape. He knocks out a guard and takes an army car and makes a dash for freedom. Inside the car is Jill and a briefcase that he chucks to the side of the road as he uses Jill as a hostage of sorts to get away. Now he’s being hunted for desertion.
He stashes Jill with a friend and goes to his office where he finds Slip comfortably sitting at his desk. He has a few scores to settle with Slip, but when he discovers what his mob has been up to, it turns everything around. It turns out that briefcase holds army weapons secrets, and it’s worth a fortune to foreign agents. Slip was planning to hijack the car with the real officer, and it turns out Slip was in possession of this goldmine but threw it away. With Jill and Slip along, they try to find out where the briefcase might have ended up. In the meantime he’s hiding out at Ma’s, who it turns out started to think of him as a real son she was proud of. Because he hid the plans there, she gets beaten to death, and Lucky starts to have a change of heart about selling the plans. But Slip gets the plans and schedules a meet with the Nazi spies he plans to sell to. It all ends up with a lot of moving around at a gardens estate where Lucky decides he’s going to get the plans back and give them back to the army. He knows it’ll mean doing the time, but now he has Jill waiting for him on the other side.
Alan Ladd makes a pretty good gangster here. He was quite the leading man who ended up mostly in western roles, most prominently as the titular character in the classic western Shane. This was the first film in which he got above the credit billing. He had an uncredited role in Citizen Kane and a part in Bela Lugosi’s The Black Cat. He shares truly good chemistry with Helen Walker as leading lady Jill. The film does a good job of keeping them mostly as enemies throughout the film, and you get to see these slight touches of the relationship you likely could have predicted would happen. Credit both actors for some nice nuance in their performances. This was actually her first film, and her most notable role would be in Brewster’s Millions.
The real standout here is Sheldon Leonard. Leonard would go on to become a legend, but it wouldn’t be just for his acting. His acting here is awesome. He plays a gangster like he was born to the role, and his voice has this menacing natural tendency to begin with. He played many gangsters in his career, and he was almost as good as regulars like George Raft. But he always took a wide range of roles. He ended up spoofing his gangster persona in films and shows like Sanford And Son as well as I Love Lucy. But what he was perhaps best known for was his production skills. He created and produced I Spy, which brought Bill Cosby out of the shadows of being merely a standup comic and made him the first black actor to break a million bucks. He would even do a guest role on The Cosby Show. I suspect he didn’t know anything about Cosby’s bartending skills. The series also launched the career of Robert Culp, who went on to become a favorite of mine in such shows as The Greatest American Hero and a four-time nemesis for Peter Falk’s Columbo.
Lucky Jordan is a pretty good little gem that can now make it to your video shelf thanks to these efforts by Kino Lorber to bring us these potentially unknown studio classics. Pick it up. “Anybody who don’t is a sucker.”
