One of the wonderful by-products of early film noir and gangster storytelling is that the viewer learns an abundance of new terms and concepts that may have gone out of fashion, but remain eternal, preserved in the cinema that was designed to entertain audiences of yesteryear, but have somehow managed to remain relevant until the present day, undoubtedly a result of their ability to be enthralling and captivating without needing to be all that bombastic. One such example is Railroaded!, the fantastic crime drama directed by Anthony Mann, which draws its title from the old-fashioned jargon that suggests someone is accused of a crime and convicted without proper evidence, leading to them being “railroaded” by the full brunt of a criminal system that simply sought to incarcerate anyone who was vaguely suggested to be a threat to society. Mann, who was working as little more than a director-for-hire at this time (with the peak of his authorial voice still being a few years away), was a tremendous choice to helm this film – he may have been working from someone’s else ideas (in this case, John C. Higgins), but he still had a distinct way of weaving many different ideas together, both visually and narratively, constructing some tremendous images and meaningful stories that occur alongside it. Whether in the intricate details or the broader strokes, Railroaded! is a terrific effort from a truly great filmmaker that may have still been finding his footing (having only been directing for a few years, many of his films during this time being on the cheaper end of the spectrum), but still demonstrated a wealth of talents.

A brief cursory glimpse at the background of this film will lead you to the case of Joseph Majczek and Theodore Marcinkiewicz, two men who were accused of murdering someone, and spent over a decade in prison before being found innocent and set free, having lost many fruitful years of their promising young lives. This served as the foundation for a few films (with the more prominent being Call Northside 777, which was released a year later, and has been relatively more embraced by audiences over time). While this film is not an attempt to explore this specific case, but rather the general idea of someone being imprisoned for a crime they did not commit, Mann and Higgins (along with Gertrude Walker, who conceived of the story) use this real-life case as the foundation for a fascinating exploration of the criminal justice system, if one can even use the word “justice” to seriously denote what many of these more questionable authorities tend to engage in. It’s not particularly thorough in looking at the mechanics that go into this kind of process (and it certainly does take several artistic liberties, as we’d expect), but it has a very interesting way of looking at these issues, turning a very complex story into a masterful, neat 71-minute thriller that feels both enticing and deeply thought-provoking. We may not always completely understand what we’re seeing, but we can certainly appreciate what is occurring around it, which makes for a suitably thrilling and deeply enticing crime drama with some peculiar but fascinating ideas.

Railroaded! is a film that is certainly very entertaining in terms of offering the viewer genuine thrills and moments of almost earth-shattering deception that keep us engaged. However, this isn’t a case of a film of this nature just being decent for the sake of being interesting – there is a genuine resonance that comes with seeing a film about how inherently flawed the criminal justice system is, especially considering the conversations that are occurring all around the world in terms of the disparity between ordinary citizens and law enforcement, which has developed a bad reputation as a result of the abhorrent actions of a few crooked individuals. This is where the film comfortably nestles itself, and gradually develops the ability to make sense of the absurdity that occurs when an innocent individual is accused of a crime, where there is a complete lack of evidence that could prove one side or the other, so the natural default is simply to assume one is guilty until proven innocence, a perversion of a basic human right afforded to all individuals. Perhaps this film is not the most nuanced exemplification of these ideas – Railroaded! is sometimes clumsy and unfocused, and its shifting perspective fails to fully embrace the wealth of ideas that could be found scattered throughout it – but it never avoids redirecting attention to what matters, so for the eagle-eyed and attentive viewer, there are some fascinating conversations to be had by this film and its stream of oddly relevant subject matter.

Considering how Railroaded! is rarely discussed when speaking on the subject of great crime films, it’s easy to just view it as yet another instance of a cheaply-made crime thriller produced with marginally well-known stars and pulled together in a short amount of time. Creatively, there is technically nothing particularly masterful about this film – it has a clear message, and its intentions are to offer a fair amount of valuable entertainment, so that viewers feel like their time (regardless of how short this film is) was spent with something actually engaging. Looking at it as a product of its time brings up discussions on Hollywood’s tendency to produce films like this rapidly, while focusing on it from a contemporary perspective evokes more interesting conversations on how the public views those in authority positions. There aren’t any heroes or villains in Railroaded!, which is supported by the moral ambiguity present in all of these characters – and the film utilizes each individual well, creating a varied array of peculiar people that populate this nightmarish version of the world. Both gritty and dreamlike, and gradually building to a crescendo of both physical and emotional violence, the film is a challenging but engaging film that carries itself with such an off-kilter energy, we can’t help but feel enticed to explore this world – albeit at our own peril.