SoftInloveRox Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

GazerRise Fantastic!

Billie Morin This movie feels like it was made purely to piss off people who want good shows

Bob This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Robert J. Maxwell Routine Warners espionage story, directed with no nonsense by Raoul Walsh. The director was responsible a few years earlier for the unexpectedly humane "High Sierra." There's a car chase here, too, but not nearly as effective as the one in which Bogart leads a horde of law-enforcement officers on a frantic and dusty pursuit into the mountains.Peter Lorre, as a Russian agent, and the pachydermal Sidney Greenstreet as the resident Nazi chief, seem left over from "The Maltese Falcon," with little of the inventiveness of the original. Brenda Marshall, a virago who was married to William Holden, has little to do. George Raft describes her as "good looking" and he's right. Raft himself is as ligneous as ever. He never relaxes. His expression is always one of vigilance. He doesn't move much, and when he does he strides, but his eyes are always alert, darting from one character to another, as if forever waiting to be betrayed. He's rarely disappointed. Turhan Bey, sleekly handsome, gets to speak Turkish, an ignoble tongue, if you ask me. The dialog runs along the lines of, "Oh, a tough guy, hey?"The MacGuffin is a set of phony plans that Russia (our ally in 1943) is supposed to have drawn up to immediately invade Turkey, the setting of the movie. The plans will be made public, arousing the nation's paranoia, and Hitler will move in and "protect" Turkey from the commies, using the nation's oil for its war effort. The plans are first in one person's hands, then another's. Finally the entire conspiracy gets the deep six.The pace never flags. Raoul Walsh knows how to keep things moving, but the narrative is pedestrian and the story and characters have little dash.

blanche-2 Ankara Turkey is a "Background to Danger" in this 1943 spy film starring George Raft, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet, and Brenda Marshall.Like others on this site, you'll be happy after seeing this that George Raft turned down all those films that made Humphrey Bogart an icon.Raft plays Joe Barton, who meets Ana Renzi (Osa Massen) on a train. She gives him money to hold for her - she will be searched upon leaving the train, but because he's an American, he won't be. The envelope she gives him is actually a series of plans sought by the Russians and the Germans, and both factions know Barton has them.Normally the presence of Lorre and Greenstreet was enough to lift a film out of mediocrity, but unfortunately here they don't have enough to do to really help. Lorre and Marshall play a Russian brother and sister after the documents, and Greenstreet is on the side of the Nazis. The Germans are trying to convince the Turks that Russia is about to invade them in order to destroy their neutrality and bring them over to the Nazis. These plans apparently outline a false attack about to take place.This is one of those films that you forget as soon as it's over. It's a lot of deadpan delivery by Raft as everyone chases him. It was nice to see Turhan Bey in a small role. Raft could be fine in a role that suited his tough look and monotone delivery - I liked Nocturne, for instance - but here he misses.Directed by the reliable Raoul Walsh, this could have been one of the films Jack Warner asked him to do as a favor. Apparently Warner was always bringing Walsh to his office and saying, you have to do film script for me. Walsh would ask, who's in it? Warner would say, "I don't know. Some bums."

bill-790 It seems that most IMDb reviewers have a pretty low opinion of "Background to Danger." Well, I admit that many of the criticisms of this film have merit. First of all, George Raft was decidedly not near the top of Hollywood actors. Second, there is, as many have observed, more than a little resemblance between this film and some others, such as "Casablanca." And I keep wondering what the film would have been like with Bogart, Cagney, or Garfield in the lead role.Nevertheless, this is a film I have enjoyed many times and probably will again. Some of Raft's lines probably would not have worked with Cagney or Garfield, but they are okay coming from Raft. And, of course, the supporting cast is really excellent.All in all, I think you will enjoy this film if you don't go in expecting something on the level of "Casablanca" or even that of "Sahara," a Columbia film of the same year starring Humphrey Bogart. In short, enjoy the fast pace and the really great support from Greenstreet, Lorre, Brenda Marshall and the others.

bkoganbing It's now part of Hollywood lore how George Raft immeasurably aided the career of Humphrey Bogart by turning down High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. After the last one I guess Raft thought he'd go for a Casablanca type story and the film of Eric Ambler's Background to Danger seemed like a good bet. If working with Sidney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre worked for Bogey...........Background to Danger only confirmed Raft's wisdom about trying to stick to what he could handle. Had he been in Casablanca, the film today would be a routine action adventure picture not the cinema classic it is.According to a biography of Raft, Peter Lorre was stealing scenes all over the place and blew cigarette smoke in Raft's face causing him to lose concentration. After repeated requests to stop doing it, Raft clocked Lorre on the chin and that settled the problems they had. On the set that is, on screen Raft registers no presence at all with his fabled co-stars.Raft is an American agent, Greenstreet a Nazi, and Brenda Marshall and Lorre are a brother and sister team of Soviet agents all looking for a forged document about false Soviet invasion plans for Turkey. The action starts in Turkey's capital of Ankara and ends up in the city of Istanbul. Background to Danger had to be the first American made film based in Ankara. Before the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire, Ankara barely passed for an oasis. Mustapha Kemal selected it for his capital because of its central location on the Anatolian peninsula. The city grew exponentially between the wars and Turkish neutrality in World War II kept up the growth rate though the Ankara we see here is depicted on the back lot of Warner Brothers studio.All the neutral capitals in the World War II years were good subjects for espionage films. Everyone of them could have been described like Ankara as a city of a thousand plots. Too bad a better film couldn't have been done here.